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If you want to type text in such languages in VTrain or other programs, you have to install a script-specific IME (Input Method Editor) that supports CJK Text. For this purpose, you can choose between the IMEs shipped with Windows and the utilities developed by third parties.
For languages not listed below, please visit the miscellaneous font downloads
page.
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There are two standards for printed Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese, the latter being sponsored by the government of the P. R. of China (Continental China) since the 1950s and adopted also by Singapore. In fact, Chinese persons of all countries use simplifications in handwriting, and many characters of Simplified Chinese had already been in use before.
There are various transliteration systems for Chinese. The most popular one today is pinyin, although zhuyin (an alphabet based on Chinese characters) is still used for instruction in Taiwan. Plans to make pinyin supersede conventional Chinese characters were eventually given up because of the large amount of homophones present in the language.
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Because of the large amount homophones present in the language, written Japanese is difficult to read unambiguously.
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In addition, in North Korea they also use Hanja characters, which are of Chinese origin. Scholars have preferred Hanja until the end of World War II. Now these characters play the role of bold face characters. In North Korea they are not in use any more.
In practice, the Korean spellling system is complex, since predictable elements that are used in speech are dropped in written language, and because of the existence of liaison and similar phenomena.
Unlike in Japanese and Chinese, in Korean you put spaces between words.
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We will use the abbreviation CJK (Chinese / Japanese / Korean) in this section.
Types of CJK fonts
Ideographic writing systems like the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Korean Hanja contain by far too many characters to fit into a conventional
one-byte font
of 256 characters. For this reason, several solutions were made available:
1.
To use a combination of several one-byte
fonts.
2.1
To use native CJK fonts
(two-byte or multi-byte).
2.2
To use fonts in the international Unicode standard (two-byte).
3.
Write (continental) Chinese in Roman transliteration (Pinyin).
Some notes on native CJK fonts:
The most popular solution in the East Asia are two-byte fonts (DBCS, Double Byte Character Sets) or even multiple byte fonts (MBCS),
Unicode being more of a "westernizing" standard. Recently, the Government of the Popular Republic of
China set the four-byte GB18030 standard. New software must support this character set to be sold in the PRC.
Today, the native East Asian DBCSs are the following:
GB (GuoBiao, simplified Chinese, mainland China / People's Republic of China),
Big5 (traditional Chinese, used in Isle of Taiwan / Republic of China).
Other encodings: China: GBX, HZ, HZX, CNS. Japan: EUC, JIS, SJIS (Shift-JIS). Korea: KSC, EUC-KR.
How do I input CJK characters?
Of course, East Asian keyboards do not have thousands of keys. A 102-keys keyboard will suffice. But you will need
a language-specific display & input add-on for your Windows system.
While Unicode fonts are supported by the Chinese IME supplied with new versions of Windows, if you want to use
native CJK fonts, you will have to install a third-party IME. (For the Pinyin, it is enough to install a specific
keyboard layout and a font, of course.) Please read the Tuning
section below.
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To use such a utility, the target editor has to have rich text capabilities, since different fonts are used in the same document.
The advantage of this method is that you do not need to have any Chinese (etc.) Windows extension on to display the characters -- the drawback is that the encoding used for these multiple fonts is not compatible with standard fonts (GB, BIG5, Unicode, etc.).
DynaLab
provide free one-byte fonts for Chinese versions of Windows.CJKWare
sell
one-byte fonts for Chinese along with their products (for Western Windows).
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Microsoft Chinese Language Support
contains two Unicode fonts (simplified / traditional).CJK Environments (see CJK Tuning below) come with two-byte fonts in various formats.
Chinese Gateway
sell native Chinese two-byte fonts.DynaLab
provide free CJK Unicode fonts.
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You can write pinyin by way of diacritical marks in Unicode fonts such as Lucida Sans Unicode, which ships with Windows XP.
One-byte pinyin fonts:
Times Pinyin font available from Jörg Sziegat's page
Prof. C.C. Cheng's Pinyin Font
Get a layout map from here . You can access most characters with single keystrokes,
so it requires some memorization on your part.Wiedenhof's Pinyin Okay
font with accent keysEasyTone
for accent keys for Pinyin and Yale romanizationChinese Pinyin Fonts
. Times Roman TrueType fonts with tone diacritics for Mandarin Chinese, designed by Chin-chuan
Cheng for the CORA
Project . See also Chinese
Pinyin Font Layout .Rich's PinYin Fonts for Mac OS and Windows
. Fonts developed by Rich D. Accents can be placed over any letter (vowel or consonant).Other popular Pinyin fonts are PinTone, TimesPinyin, New Pinyin, Chinese Pinyin, AddTones.
See also Mike Colley's font collection
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| - | Using native CJK fonts in a CJK environment. |
| - | Using Unicode fonts & Windows Chinese etc. Language Support (Windows NT4/2000/XP only). |
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Of course, you use a transliteration or a similar scheme. For Chinese for instance, there are various input methods: PinYin, Zhuyin Fuhao, four-corner, Wubi, CangJie, QuWei, Cantonese, BoPoMoFo, more.
What happens in the background?
If you use Unicode with Microsoft's Chinese (etc.) IME (input method editor), it will work as fine as if you typed in any other script.
On the other hand, a CJK environment works as follows: when you input a two-byte character, the environment sends a pair of ANSI characters to the target editor, although they will still be displayed on the screen as a single ideogram (as explained at "How to view" above).
This is also the way East Asian webpages are encoded. If you use a CJK environment to input non-Unicode fonts and shut down the CJK environment, you will see only odd characters in the file. You need to have the CJK environment running to see them in Chinese etc.
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www.opencjk.org
Focuses on Chinese/Japanese/Korean related Open Source Software. 
MViewPro 5.0
($5) by Albert Chong. Viewing only, no strong input support. Works even on regular ANSI-applications.Can use Microsoft's Unicode CJK fonts, but supports other encodings. Automatic encoding recognition. Unique feature: you can restrict the font overriding to the fonts that are actually Chinese (etc.), thus allowing real multilingual document display.
Suntendy Chinese Star
($343)
with Princeton's loading instructions .
A new program by the maker of the TwinBridge Chinese Partner. More stable than TB.
NJStar Communicator
($99) With Princeton's loading instructions.Twinbridge Chinese Partner
($249) Unstable (system crashes often). Check Princeton's loading instructions.CJKWare's Sunrise2001
($495-595)RichWin
displays beautful CJK fonts in Western textUnion Way's Asian Suite
with Princeton's loading instructions .
Its input mode uses Unicode fonts (or ugly bitmap fonts in regular ANSI applications) only (?).Erik Peterson's Word97 Chinese Input
Free macro for MS Word97. Allows pinyin input of Chinese; Unicode
only :-(.
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Pinyin Editor
(Freeware) Also included in the Free Chinese Dictionary available from the same authors.
Write and print Chinese texts in the official transliteration of the P.R. of China.
DingDang Write
(Shareware, $20-40) Rich text editor for Chinese.
Bitmap fonts. Font editor. OLE and Clipboard support. Various input methods, tables are customizable. Big5 <-> GB conversion.
Read the info from Gyula Szigri
, who further states that to display Chinese in DingDang Write you may also need Rich Edit 3.0
(Riched30.exe), downloadable from SmartFTP .J-Text by NeocorTech (mirrored at SimTel
) (Freeware, 2.7 MB, 1998) Japanese text editor for learners, with kana tables for quick lookup.
Japanese Word Processor
(Freeware) by Stephen Chung, for Windows 3.1 and higher.JWPce
(Freeware) by Glenn RosenthalTwo-byte editors (standalone editors):
EditPad Lite 4.2.0
,
a fine replacement of Windows Notepad with many other features. Supports Unicode.UniEdit
Multilingual (including CJK and IPA) text editor from Duke U.'s Humanities Computing Facilities. Win 3.1 or higher.
Supports Unicode.EmEditor 1.27
(Freeware, 3.0 is shareware) is a notepad replacement that supports Unicode characters. (English
and German versions, plus Chinese plugin.)Codepage converters:
Convert Big 5 to GIF
Convert Big 5 (HTML) to GIF
[enter URL; converts entire webpage]Convert Big 5 / GB text
Java, Chinese viewer necessaryConvert Big 5 / GB / HZ / UTF-8 files
Convert UTF to GB
Guess Encoding of Big 5 / GB / HZ / UTF-8 / ASCII files or webpages
Romanization Converter
Converts among BoPoMoFo, Wade-Giles, Pinyin, French SystemMore info:
Indpt. Fed. of Chinese Students and Scholars in the US
Prof. Marjorie Chan's homepage
is the ultimate address for Chinese and Japanese.Carlos McEvilly's Chin. Lang.-Related Info. Page
Cyberway-to-China
Chinese University of Hong Kong : HanziX
, a unified platform for Chinese computingTaiwan University : reading BIG5 characters
Using Japanese with a PC
. Reference to commercial products, freeware, shareware, demo versions.To Users of Japanese Browsers
. From the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, St. Cloud State University.
Issues on the use of Kanji codes on the Web and lots of links.Read Chinese in Net Applications
, (University of Regina, Saskatchewan).Lienhe Zaobao
provides online help for all platforms.See Windows installation instructions
for compressed files.Legal notice.
Our homepage is http://www.vtrain.net