🚀 go-pugleaf

From the new (winter '87) 'Whole Earth Review' (Stewart Brand's valiant 
effort to keep the SF Bay Area on the side of unlawfullness and disorder):

For the ms-dos victims-
'Kuo Chiao Chinese characters: version 1.0 $174 postpaid from Key International,
834 Henderson Ave., Sunnyvale CA 94056; 408/247 6220'  'It allows four methods
of entering words as characters: 1) by Pinyin (Roman letters); 2) by Chinese
phonetics; 3) by radical and stroke order; and 4) by creating your own.' 
'...the most affordable' '...gives you 10,000 full-blooded Chinese characters'.

'TianMa: version 2.06.  $615 postpaid from Pacific Rim Connections, 3030
Atwater Drive, Burlingame CA 94010; 415/699 0911'  'Far more elegant... 
similar input methods, but does sophisticated word analysis in which it will
select the proper character based on the other words in a phrase.  ...comes
with a dedicated RAM card ... You'll still need a graphics card.  It will
manipulate 9,000 characters, traditional or simplified'.

AND TWO FOR THE MAC:

'FeiMa: S(mall) version, $200; regular version $400; SE version $590, all
postpaid from Unisource Software, 23 East Street, Cambridge, MA 02141;
617/477-8383' '...the usual way of entering characters as well as two others:
pick one out of a scrolling dictionary, or type in the English word and it 
will translate.  The graphic superiority comes at the price of a smaller 
glossary' (5,480 words in the SE [i.e., hard-disk?] version; 2,400 in the 
regular [MacPlus] version).

APDA: membership $25. 290 SW 43rd Street, Renton, WA 98055; 206/251-6548.
Supplies Apple's Chinese operating system for the Mac, which is a suitable
foundation to roll your own program (sic).  This OS is called ZhongWen 
(Chinese for 'Chinese'!)

This summary is the conclusion of a five-page discussion of automating
Chinese, which includes more details of the programs summarized.  Where
else but the Whole Earth...

Ron Goldthwait  / U.Calif / Psychology & Animal Behavior / Davis, CA 95616