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From: xxiaoye@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Xiaoxia  Ye)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Chinese word processing
Message-ID: <11998@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
Date: 28 Jan 89 17:06:22 GMT
References: <8901271611.AA06203@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Sender: news@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU
Reply-To: xxiaoye@eleazar.dartmouth.edu
Organization: Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
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In article <8901271611.AA06203@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> ELFJ@VAX5.CIT.CORNELL.EDU writes:
>Does anyone know anything about word processing on the Mac?  Has anyone
>used FeiMa and have any comments, good or bad?
>
>Any help will be much appreciated.
>
>Linda Iroff
>Humanities Computing
>Cornell University
>elfj@crnlvax5.bitnet
>elfj@vax5.cit.cornell.edu

First of all, FeiMa is not for macintosh, it's for IBM.  I only wish
that they have a Mac version.  It's a great program, the printout is
superb on a regular Epson dot-matrix printer.  It looks even better on
a laster printer.  Input of characters is painless.  It guesses the
WORD, not character that you input, and about 90% of the time, its
guess is right.  One caveat: if you use it to write ancient chinese
(which very uses diffrent WORDING from modern chinese,the so called
Bai2Hua4Wen2 (Plain-Talking-Lanuage)), its guesses are horrible.  But
for most of modern chinese writing, it's excellent.

There are 2 chinese word precessors that I have seen people use at the
Asian Studies Department here at Dartmouth.  The first one is ChineseTalk
(ZhongWen Talk).  Actually, ChineseTalk is not an application, it's a
system all by it self, in which you can switch between the Chinese and
English writing mode.  MacWrite is the only word processor that can
properly run under this sysem.  ChineseTalk has a BeiJing verion and
TaiPei version, ( with simplified and unsimplified character sets,
respectively)  I forgot the company's address.  If you need to know, I
can ask the people in Humanities computing here.

Another program is called MacChinese.  I haven't seen it, but from what
I have heard from a friend it is very UNMACISH, and very unwieldy to
use, such as that you would have to remember the EXACT pinyin of each
character plus you would have to know the exact order of a particular character
in its dictionary character set.  If you input the wrong order number,
you get the wrong characer, you would have to try again and again,
until you get it right.  One advantage of MacChinese is that it has a
POSTSCRIPT font.

There is a DA called "Mishu" (meaning secretary in chinese").  It runs
under the standard Mac Operating System, and works with programs like
MacWrite, MacPaint, and even PageMaker!  It's very nice, except that
it's not as powerful as the other two Chinese word processors.  Its
dictionary is not large enough, and DON'T EVER TRY TO PRINT ON A LASER
WRITER!!!  It would take 50 minutes or so to create the bitmaps of all
the 11 fonts that it use to construct the characters, and probably the
printer is going to flush the job with some kind of "offending command"
complaint.  Mishu has a new version now.  I haven't seen it, but I
would expect it to be better.
"VOX CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO" -- ahh, who else do I speak for!
__________________________________________________________________________
Xiaoxia  Ye               Internet/Bitnet    xxiaoye@eleazar.dartmouth.edu
Dartmouth College                   /UUCP:   Xiaoxia.Ye@dartmouth.edu