Mac Chinese

[Guest guest]

Doug, and all,

 

> I've got a Mac and I've been looking for a translation tool for Chinese to

> English. Needless to say I haven't come up with anything satisfactory so

> far. Eventually someone will come up with one and the components are

> slowly coming into place.

 

I think there will be several solutions in one to three years. The technology

is there but the implementations are delayed because it is not fully executed.

You cannot, for example, get all you need from off-the-shelf fonts and

English-centered font manipulation software is not adequate for Chinese.

 

> Unfortunately, anything new in Mac will be

> written in OSX (which for me is sort of like computing under water).

 

OSX will help the Mac with Chinese. Because the underlying OS provides

an easier target for developers and is more amenable to double-byte fonts,

more developers will undertake Mac software. The reason the Mac lags in

some regards is because the market size is so small and the development

costs are thus relatively larger. Although the Mac interface earned the

loyalty of its users, I don't personally notice anything about the OS X

interface that is actually less " friendly " than OS 9. I do notice, however,

that it is far easier to integrate with servers, can take greater advantage of

fonts from other sources, and has literally hundreds of useful open source

utilities available.

 

I'm not sure what " under water " means but OS X is a nice accomplishment

and will do a lot to make sys admins more willing to deal with Macs and that

will increase its market share.

 

> Clavis 3.1 at $50 attempts to be an alternative to Wenlin. It is pretty

[. . .]

 

Thanks for the head's up.

 

> Neither of these programs are word processors. Word and Appleworks are not

> that well suited for Chinese characters unfortunately.

 

Which WORD version are you using? WORD 2000 and upward, (as much

as I dislike all-for-everyone programs and as balky as I find WORD on both

the PC and Mac), is more likely to do the " right thing " with different fonts

and encodings than any other word processor I have tried. Textedit on OS

X is a good program for text composition.

 

I tested Word for OS X with a PC file and it behaved very, very well. I

have, however, had trouble getting the simsun font that Microsoft

distributes with WORD to work on the Mac. I've read it can be done but

have not succeeded.

 

Bob

 

 

bob Paradigm Publications

www.paradigm-pubs.com 44 Linden Street

Robert L. Felt Brookline MA 02445

617-738-4664

 

 

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