Asian fonts

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Info-CHIBolts,
  I would like to report a bit on the current status of CLAN processing for
Asian characters.  First, for Macintosh OS 9, CLAN is able to properly
enter, store, and analyze characters in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.  It
also works fine for simpler Asian scripts including Thai and various Indian
languages.  The major limitation on the Mac is that full Unicode is not yet
supported.  Unicode is available for European languages and can help provide
some uniformity for treatement of scripts such as Hungarian or Turkish.
However, there is not yet a CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) Unicode font for
Mac.  It is possible that OS X will improve on this situation.  Another
limitation on the Mac is that the HKSCS needed for Cantonese is not
available, so you can only enter Traditional Chinese characters.  I believe
that this will change soon.  In fact, I have been told that a Cantonese
supplement is available somewhere.
  On Windows, CLAN seems to work perfectly for Chinese Windows 98 and 2000.
I have not tried Korean Windows.  However, for Japanese, it only works well
with Windows 2000.  Even there, there are display problems when script is
initially entered.  However, you can enter text in Word Pad under Japanese
Windows 2000 and then cut into CLAN and this works OK.  We believe that we
may be able to fix this problem.  However, neither CLAN nor Word are working
OK without something like Twinbridge for Japanese Windows 98.
  For English Windows 98 and 2000, the situation is less clear.  These
systems can be upgraded with various patches from Microsoft, but they are
hard to get and few users are interested in using English Windows to type
Asian characters, so we do not plan to pursue this unless we know that there
are people who care about this option.

  As Unicode becomes the default, much of this will improve, although I
don't have much hope for a full Unicode on Japanese Windows 98 unless
Microsoft works out a patch.  It is also possible that we may get CLAN to
work a bit better on Japanese Windows 2000 by some changes to the program.

--Brian MacWhinney