Win2000 can be made to
support Ext B characters. Download the support package at:
Office2000 does NOT support Ext B or any Unicode characters above
plane 0, but OfficeXP does.
The Proofing Tools for Office2000 naturally do not include
support for Ext B since Office2000 does not support that.
The Proofing Tools for OfficeXP include a GB18030 font that
covers Ext B (and one for plane 0 CJK and Ext A). It also includes a
rudimentary IME for these characters based on character code.
The Insert Symbol dialog in OfficeXP has been improved to allow
you to search by Unicode value (as well as larger glyphs, resizable, appearing
in all apps, etc). In Word2002 (OfficeXP) you can also enter a Unicode
character directly by typing the character value in hex and then using the
Alt-X shortcut.
Chris
I'm not sure but I think Proofing Tools can be used
with Win2000. I don't have it installed now, but I am sure there were
still some graphs that I couldn't find.
I have found some of the graphs I'm looking for in the
"CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B" chart. After reading up on GB18030
(thanks for that), it seems that "[s]ince GB18030
is fully ISO 10646 compatible, it readily supports CJK Extension B and other
languages." I don't have the GB18030 font or Extension B Charset in my
machine. Can I load CJK Extensions A and B without switching to XP?
I would prefer to use Win2000, or the ME which I
am running now, but if necessary I can use XP.
Allen
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, March 21, 2003 12:34
PM
Subject: RE: CJK question
Have you tried the MS-Office Proofing Tools?
It
contains a font for GB 18030 characters as well as
an
updated version of the MS IME.
The install program forces you to have MS-Office XP
installed.
However, I've seen comments on the web suggesting that you
can
use it without XP.
--Erik Ostermueller
Hello,
First my apologies if I have missed something
already available on the Unicode website that I should have already known,
as well as for my total lack of expertise in the fields commonly under
discussion in this forum. If anyone knows of a more appropriate place
towards which I should direct my woes, I would be glad to hear of
it.
I work with Classical Chinese texts which contain
numerous characters not in any character sets I use (Arial Unicode MS; CJK
Unified Ideographs), or know of. I was delighted to see that most--if not
all--of the graphs I need are in Unicode charts. However they all seem to
be images, so it seems that I cannot use them. I need to be able to
both input and display the rare graphs in my MS system. As far as I
can tell, what I may need to do is add
characters to my existing character sets, or get new character sets
altogether.
For example, in a website I commonly use to view
reliable, annotated editions of source texts www.chant.org (Chinese Ancient Texts
Center at the Chinese U of Hong Kong), I frequently encounter blank spaces
where rare graphs are located. (I have downloaded all their
fontpacks.)
Third-party layovers with "font-maker" utilities
such as Twinbridge or Chinese Star are too
unstable, in my experience causing frequent crashes. Furthermore they
are not always convertible to or compatible with unicode. The most stable
setup I have found for a PC is a localized version of Win2000, however the
MS input methods for Chinese are much too cumbersome and slow, cover
only a portion of the language, of course have no font-maker utility, and
do not even seem to be able to retrieve all the graphs stored in my
existing character sets.
Besides Chinese and Japanese graphs, I also need to
occasionally enter Latin or other letters with diacritical marks, such as
romanized Sanskrit (for Buddhist terms), IPA symbols, and others, but I
cannot always find them in the character sets I have. Some of you should
get a chuckle (or a groan) to learn that I'm manually searching through
character sets in "Insert (drop-down); Symbol..." in MS Word 2000 to
find them. Of course their location gets memorized after a while--but this
gets more difficult with CJK graphs! (They're not true ideographs, by
the way--they are mostly logographic.)
I realize there may be no easy solution for my
problem, but any advice would be greatly appreciated.
From a frustrated sinologist,
Allen
Haaheim