Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!crdgw1!galen.crd.ge.com!leue
From: leue@galen.crd.ge.com (Bill Leue)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Japanese Fonts
Keywords: fonts, Japanese, hiragana, katakana
Message-ID: <4382@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>
Date: 29 Dec 89 21:11:13 GMT
Sender: news@crdgw1.crd.ge.com
Reply-To: leue@galen.crd.ge.com (Bill Leue)
Organization: General Electric Research & Development
Lines: 33

Does anyone know of any freeware or shareware screen fonts for the
Japanese hiragana and/or katakana alphabets?  I looked in the sumex-aim
fonts directory, but didn't see anything.

What I am looking for is some screen fonts that will work with any old
(English) word processor.  A Japanese word processor is >not< really
needed for what I am trying to do -- namely, practice the little bit of
Japanese that I know and perhaps insert some Japanese strings into a
regular English-language document.

For those who don't know any Japanese, the hiragana and katakana alphabets
do NOT have thousands of characters -- you're thinking of kanji, the 
ideographic alphbet based on Chinese characters.  That alphabet does 
require a dedicated Japanese/Chinese word processor and the ability to
handle 16-bit ASCII.  However, the hiragana and katakana are much smaller,
phonetic alphabets that fit comfortably into the 8-bit ASCII range.

I've been tinkering around trying to make a font of my own, but I'm
hampered by not owning Fontastic or some other good font editor -- and
ResEdit's font editing is a little to hairy for me to hack with no
documentation :-(.

BTW, if anyone out there has been working on this problem, I'd be interested
to hear what scheme you've come up with for mapping hiragana characters
to a US keyboard.  Sadly, you really need 5 key mappings for each key
to get all the syllables mapped 'naturally'; e.g., the 'K' column in the
hirgana 'ABC's has five entries, for 'KA', 'KI', 'KU', 'KE', and 'KO'.
But there's only 4 different ways to map the 'K' key into different
characters, using normal, shifted, option, and option-shift modifier keys.
Frustrating!  Has anyone come up with a neat-o scheme?

-Bill Leue
leue@crd.ge.com