🚀 go-pugleaf

Some time ago I mentioned that I had gotten NB to display Chinese characters
while running under ETen 3.0, and I promised to get back to the list with
an update when I figured out printing and so forth.  Well, I haven't quite
done that, but I thought I'd leave some comments here on what's involved.

Yes, NB will display Chinese characters under ETen 3.0 -- sort of.  That is,
it does very nicely with most characters, except if they happen to use an
NB formatting command code (one of the double bracket characters--I forget
now what the ASCII code is) as part of the two-byte code to represent that
particular character.  Which leads me to suspect that someone clever (which
definitely does not include me, but which hopefully would include the good
folks at "NB Informatics") might possibly be able to write a tsr program to
interrup the limited number of characters having problematic characters (this
is the Big 5 character code, by the way) as they move between ETen and NB
and the screen, substituting alternate values so as to eliminate the
interference in an ad hoc sort of way.  Maybe this is a perfectly crazy idea,
but I have confidence the members of this list will let me know that pretty
quickly...

The longrange solution is of course to rewrite the source code for NB so
that it can handle DBCS data -- that's double-byte character set data.
Microsoft has just announced the distribution of development packages for
Windows aimed at encouraging non-Asian software developers to write their
software so that it can be marketed in East Asia; note that the use of DBCS
data does not require that a program use a graphical interface, which NB
wants to avoid.   (BTW, if you're interested in the Windows Far East
Development Package--that's close to the correct name--send an e-mail
request to fesdkmkt@microsoft.com.  Don't ask me for information, 'cause
I haven't gotten mine yet!)  Of course, it would no doubt be best if NB
were rewritten to use Unicode rather than Big 5 (used by Taiwanese companies),
with appropriate filters for file conversion...

Any thoughts, folks?  I've written Steve watsiname at Dragonfly several
times in the past about a CJK-capable Nota Bene, and am willing to do so
again if anyone thinks doing so wouldn't be totally useless.


John R. McRae
Asst. Professor of East Asian Religions
Department of Asian Studies
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY  14853-2502
607/255-1328
fax:   -1686
e-mail:  jrm@cornella.cit.cornell.edu (Internet)
         jrm@cornella.bitnet          (Bitnet)