🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <gV7rKCy00UwCU-80tD@andrew.cmu.edu> (Robert J. Kauffman) writes:

> A description of a Chinese Word Processor for the MAC follows my message. It
> is taken from a previous post on one of the nn bboards I think. The post is
> not current, but I called Wu, who will be sending me some literature. You
> might do the same.
> 
> I am looking for a Chinese Word Processing package for an IBM compatible
> machine. Any suggestions anyone might have would be appreciated.

Before I begin the scathing diatribe I am planning :-), I should say that
I've never used FeiMa on an IBM machine.  My experience is based on using
FeiMa on a Macintosh Plus.  I kind of doubt that an IBM version even
exists, since the Wu company is very small (FeiMa shi Wu xiansheng ziji
xie de software, wo xiang).

FeiMa on the Mac is a *DISASTER*.  I don't think there are any viable
alternatives to it, but I'd look very hard before committing to plop down
$500 for a system of such questionable utility.

> From: earvax!ijs@EDDIE.MIT.EDU (Ishmael J. Stefanov-Wagner)
> Subject: Re: Chinese Character Word Processor
> 
> We recently saw a demonstration of FeiMa, a Chinese Word Processor
> for the 512K Mac.

Maybe it did run on the 512K Mac at one time, but it does no longer.  You
must now have at least one megabyte of memory.  In addition, you must have
two disk drives if you expect to create documents.

> User interface, I/O, etc. is all in Chinese or icons.

Yes, but see below.

> Looks great.

I agree.  The fonts are very nicely done.

> Character entry is by Chinese Typewriter (on screen via mouse), 
> calligraphic recognition, or four other means.

Here's where things really start to get hairy.  It sounds very sweet and
innocent to say that you can just pick characters off a Chinese Typewriter
displayed on the screen until you actually think about what this entails.
The size of the virtual 'keyboard' is many times that of the screen, so
you must scroll around painfully hunting and pecking.  I'll admit that you
could probably make fairly good time if you could already use a real-life
Chinese Typewriter, but it just isn't reasonable to expect someone to
memorize the layout of a 3,000 square grid just so they can use your
software.

Calligraphic character entry is a joke.  It simply does not work.  You are
presented with a traditional Chinese calligraphic square with various
regions marked on it, and are supposed to draw the character with the
mouse.  Besides the fact that the drawing helpers are primitive (make a
line and erase a line), it is difficult to get the layout right.  The
descriptive information for each character is stored with a granularity no
finer than region-by-region, so unless you form your characters in exactly
the right way they won't be recognized.  If you get one stroke of an
18-stroke character out of place, you are out of luck.  This entry system
would probalbly be fine if the prototypical letterforms were reasonable,
but they are distorted and stylized to boot.

The radical-encoded input method seems to work well, but of course you
must know the radical code for every character you want to use.  Again,
not a reasonable or friendly way to do things.

The pinyin input method is usable, but just barely.  You type the pinyin
for the character you want into a separate window and (optionally) the
tone.  The lower part of the window fills up with all the appropriate
characters and you then go scrolling around hunting for the one you want.
It's extremely slow, but you don't need to know anything you don't already
know to use it.  It doesn't understand compounds or anything like that;
every single character must be laboriously selected.

I recently got the chance to play with a Xerox multi-lingual word
processing system which was able to do Chinese.  Input was handled quite
nicely by allowing you to type in pinyin (without tones even!) and just
hit the space bar between 'words'.  It guessed the right character from a
one-syllable word about 50% of the time, and seemed to always get
multi-syllable words correct.  If you didn't like its selection, you would
have to move the mouse over to another window and hunt and peck just as in
FeiMa; oh well, nothing's perfect.

> Characters printed and displayed at 24*24 pixel resolution.

Which makes them look rather huge and bloated on the Mac's display.  This
is not the fault of the authors, of course, there really isn't too much of
an alternative.

> Also includes traditional-> simplified character translation.

Very nicely done, you just select which character set you want to work 
with from a menu.  I don't think you can mix and match between the
two, though.

> Faster than other Mac software I have seen. 

Yes, BECAUSE IT IS NOT MAC SOFTWARE!  It does not obey any of the
Macintosh's user interface guidelines and uses the actual operating system
as little as possible.  This is my main gripe with FeiMa.

Every time you want to use FeiMa, you have to boot off the FeiMa disk.
You can't run it from the Finder (even if you could recognize it, since
none of the files have icons).  It is not even a self-contained
application; there are scads of funky configuration and dictionary files
(with names like 'WIUCDLKBTL', probably radical encoded) lying around.

FeiMa does not use the menu manager, the window manager, the resource
manager, the SFGetFile package, or any of the other systems that make
Macintosh programs reasonably similar to one another in basic operation.
FeiMa is NOTHING LIKE a Mac program, you will think you've bought a whole
new computer to learn how to use.

FeiMa supposedly 'replaces' the Finder with its own little environment.
Well isn't that special.  It is an all-Chinese environment, but it can't
even hold a candle to the very earliests versions of the Apple Finder.
There are only three basic 'Finder' operations in FeiMa - enter the word
processor, enter the dictionary editor, or copy files.

> Does have capability to include english text if desired.  

Provided you are willing to enter the text letter-by-letter as if each
letter were a separate character (with 24 x 24 bitmap and all).

> Has standard 35*70 set of `typewriter' characters, optional 3k characters 
> which can selected for `spare' slots on the typewriter, plus ability to 
> draw your own characters.

Which is basically reasonable, but flawed in the FeiMa implementation.
It's not just the 'Chinese Typewriter' that is affected, it is FeiMa's
'working dictionary'.  This means that if you come across a character you
need that is not in the working dictionary, you have to save your
document, start up the dictionary editor, find the character you need by
SCROLLING THROUGH THE LIST OF ALL EXTRA CHARACTERS (3,000 remember), add
it to the working dictionary, restart the word processor, then resume your
work.

Since the working dictionary only has a couple of hundred 'free' slots
(all others are hardwired and can't be reprogrammed), you will quickly
find yourself running up against this limitation.  Not only this, but
documents are stored using the offsets into the dictionary tables, meaning
that if you EVER change the location of a character or replace it with
something else you will have some mighty funky-looking stuff happen when
you reload old files.

> WOW!

Oh please.

> Even if you do not use the editing capabilities...

What editing capabilities?  The ONLY capabilities provided are cut-and-paste
and search-and-replace.  No rulers, no tabs, no margins, etc.

> ...it is much faster and easier to use than the mechanical typewriter, 
> as you can zip about with the mouse and just click on a character rather
> than the whole song and dance of inking the type and striking - plus it is 
> right reading rather than reversed. 

I can't comment on this, since I've never used a real typewriter.  It sure
seems like a come-down from MS Word 3.0!

Anyway, my complaint is that FeiMa is not a well-thought-out system.
Instead of giving it fifteen bazillion entry modes, none of which are
usable, I wish Wu had endowed it with some rudimentary intelligence
(compound word recognition, text formatting, etc.).

--------------------
Garth Snyder            UUCP: seismo!hao!swatsun!garth
Univ. of CO @ Boulder   ARPA: garth@boulder.colorado.edu
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