Subject: FAQ: What the hell is CCCII? (Was Re: 26000

From: Chris Delucia <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1993 18:05:58 +0800

Thanks to Christian Wittern for the informative FAQ on CCCII.

I have used CCCII many times in the Taiwan University Library to check
catalogs at the Fu Sinian Lib (Acad. Sinica) & elsewhere here in Taiwan
(though I never successfully got into the Nat. Central Library catalog -
an additional password seems to be necessary there). Thinking ahead to
a time when I can't walk to the Taida library (like next week!), I've
wondered how one can access these Chinese libraries from abroad. Apparently,
with Big-5, one can get the menus, but can't look up books.

In an ftpsite directory, I can't remember which one, I came across some
files called "cccii.tbl" and "chgcode.exe" which apparently allow for
character conversion between CCCII and Big-5. I didn't check it out, but
I got the "readme" file on it. I called up the company that sold this
program a couple of months ago. The conversion program would be of no
use in trying to log into Chinese libraries remotely, but they also
sold a commercial version of CCCII (that apparently could). I don't have
the name or phone # of this company handy (I'm packing & leaving for the
US in 2 days), but I recall that the CCCII program was called something
like "Da4 Han4." It cost something along the lines of $50,000 NT (nearly
$2000 US) for their basic system of 20,000 characters, and @ $100,000 for
the full system of 50,000 (and at least 1 intermediate version, 30,000?).

Does anyone have any details on this program, or know someone who's used
it? Though obviously not priced for Sinologists, it does indicate some
commercial interest in the CCCII direction. It is supposedly available
in computer stores, but in my few brief trips this summer to computer
stores I didn't see it.

My main concern, as I'm sure is the case with many CCNETers as well,
is simply being able to produce all the characters I need to use.
I am not a programmer, so it doesn't really matter to me if the character
is represented by 1, 2 or 3 bytes (though it may matter to my HD). I
guess there are two ways of being able to meet my needs - an affordable
CCCII-like program that comes with virtually every character that appears
in extant texts, or a program that's more streamlined but has a good
character creation utility. I currently use ETEN Flying Saucer (Feidie)
#5, which has a 24 X 24 pixel (for printing out) character editor. It's
not pretty, but it works. A few months ago, in the process of inputting
some Han dynasty literature, I created about 50 characters. Naturally,
I didn't bother to create variant character forms unless there was something
otherwise significant to discuss about it. Let's say there were @ 40
that were unique characters. Of these 40 or so, I was able to locate most
(@ 30) in vol 2 of _The Unicode Standard_. So, much better than Big-5, but
I still would have had to create several characters.

I am looking forward to any and all developments in increasing the number
of available characters (CCCII, Unicode & Guangyun each have their merits),
but I think character editors should be developed too. Even with Unicode
or Guangyun character pools, I would still have to create the occasional
character (maybe that wouldn't be the case for CCCII, who knows). As for
current users of Big-5, I would guess that the vast majority rarely needs
to use characters outside of that set. If someone only encounters the
need to create a character a few times a year, it's probably not worth
hundreds or thousands of dollars to have 30,000 characters sit there on your
hard drive. I'm not familiar with all the types of character editing/
creating utilities, but I do know that Chinese Windows has TrueType fonts,
but a TrueType font editor still does not exist.

Well, I've spent more time on this than I should. Hope this discussion is
still going strong in a couple of days when I check in from the Far West.
If anyone wants to write me directly, my Taiwan U. account will remain
active for a while, so I can try to respond from the US.

                        Chris DeLucia
                        [email-masked]

Re:

> First of all, thanks to Huang Chih-hsien and the NCTUCCCA for making
> available this treasurehouse of Chinese Characters. I'm sure, this
> will help getting CCCII implementations and will generally encourage
> usage of CCCII more than any commercial application could, hopefully
> to the benefit of all scholars dealing with Chinese.

.....

> How can I use CCCII?
>
> To my knowledge, there has been only hardware dependent
> implementations of CCCII (an add-on board for the IBM-PC,
> which sells for more than 2000 US$). This is partly due
> to the fact, that the handling of fonts for 70000 Character
> shapes is surely demanding in terms of system resources.
>
> I believe that CCCII is the only solution for scholarly use
> of computers, so I sincerely hope this will encourage some
> developers to work with CCCII and to come up with some
> solutions, which will soon proof to be far better for Chinese
> than anything based on Unicode.