🚀 go-pugleaf

Greetings!
Thanks to Ken Lunde's excellent new book, 'Understanding Japanese
Information Processing' I have found this news group and mailing list far
sooner that I might have alone.


I am assisting a development team to develop a good strategy for
supporting Japanese and Chinese on a DG Aviion platform.  The geographic
markets are Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.  Taiwan and mainland China
will follow.  Ken's book answers all questions about Japan.  I wish
however to ensure that my recommendations indicate the most expedient
implementation of both Japanese and Chinese.  The ideal solution of
course would be an ISO 10646-1/Unicode 1.1 implementation, but political
and market issues surrounding this new standard and encoding method
prevent me from going in this direction immediately.


Choices are:


		Codeset Standard   Encoding Metho  Input Method  Font Source

Hong Kong	Big5		   Big5,EUC:pkd/cmp   ?		 ?
		GB?	           GB, EUC	      ?          ?


Singapore	GB 2312-80(0)	   GB, EUC:pkd,cmp    ?          ?



Taiwan          Big5		  Big 5,EUC:pkd,cmp    ?          ?


Main.China      GB-2312-80(0)     GB,EUC:pkd,cmp       ?          ?
                GB (1-5)?	  " "    " "           ?          ?
                this ? applies
                to Singapore
                market, too.
                Are 7K chars
                enough to provide
                robust support of
                Chinese?

The above questions target internal code- which for the moment is my
client's only concern- to distribute information and applications via
proprietary terminals and software (networked through DGAviion servers)
to the global financial and investment community.  However, the day may
come when my client wishes to support multilingual email and multilingual
application interactivity, and I also welcome all external codeset
support recommendations and experience.  I have just purchased the
wonderful 'An Introduction to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Computing' by
Jack K. and Tomothy D. Huang, and recommend it as an excellent
reference.  I admire the authors for their complete honesty and high
level of aethetic sensibility along with their technical competence.

Regarding Chinese input, I am aware of the following input methods - but
would appreciate feedback on experience/recommendations in specific
markets of HongKong, Singapore, Taiwan, Mainland China:

PinYin- I have used this method myself-based on Western phonetics
ZhuYin- based on Chinese phonetics- but for which markets? Taiwan?
        HongKong? Singapore? Mainland China? all?
Quwei-  Targets non-programmers according to TwinBridge by PC express-
        yet seems to resemble kuten? Is this a popular method? Are there                Chinese or Chinese/English dictionaries tha
        dictionaries give defintions + quwei.  Any good on-line Chinese/English
        dictionaries?
Telegraph code- Is support required?
Simple-Stroke(radical)-

GB Code- I tend to think of this as an encoding method- but apparently also
          used for input- Is it a good way for programmers to input brief strings         of text to be used as context-sensitive h
          to Singapore, Mainland China. Also  GB to Quwei seems to be similar
          metaphor to that of JIS to Kuten.
Big5Code- Is it necessary to use HKUBig5 to support Hong Kong?  Again Big5 to
          to Quwei relationship possibly helpful for certain tasks.

I see many tables and conversion utilities available ifcss.org, crl.nmsu.edu- am
not sure how to select- can anyone make suggestions?  Someone has mentioned notion of
'preprocessor' to me as corresponding to Japanese FEP- I think the Twinbridge utility might fall into this category.  Are there oth


Best Regards, and

dwosye,

Susan lasovick
lasovick@world.std.com