Subject: On inputting Chinese into Innopac remotely

From: John McRae <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1993 15:22:19 -0500

I received the following message from Steve Silberstein of Innovative,
which should help clarify the remote input situation.  We'll still
have to test this to make sure it allows searching by Chinese
character...  -- John McRae

------- Forwarded Message

Date:    Fri, 02 Apr 93 09:02:26 -0800
>From:    [email-masked] (Steve Silberstein)
To:      [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Input Chinese remotely?

Dear JOhn,
  You CAN input Chinese remotely. Your input device needs, however, to
send all eight bits. If you are seeing the CJK characters, then your
display device is receiving 8 bits. If you can't input CJK chars, then
your inputting device is not sending all 8 bits. Make sure it is set to
do so. Also, make sure any computers and networks that you go thru are
sending all 8 bits. Most UNIX machines, for example default to sending
only 7 bits. Execute the UNIX command    stty -istrip   to make sure it
is sending 8 bits. If going thru a terminal server, check its settings.
Your computer center people should be able to help on this.
(Sun's have another command for this).
- -- Steve S.

************************** Original Message *************************

>From: John McRae <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Apr 93 09:44:22 -0500
To: <[email-masked]>, eastlib <[email-masked]>,
        Steve Silberstein <ssilberstein@vega>
Subject: Re: Input Chinese remotely?

>HI, dear ccnetters!
>
>I am righ now evaluating some OPACs (Online Public Access Catalogs,
>i.e. library catalogs) for school.  I wonder if there any software out
>there allow me to input Chinese to search for a book written in
>Chinese, in some of the university catalogs, say, Hongkong univ of
>Techn. & Sci., Taiwan JiaoTong Univ., etc.
>
>I tried to preloaded kc on my PC and telnet the catalog.  I can
>display the Chinese items, but cannot input Chinese.  Any suggestions,
>Will CXTERM do the job?  Thanks for your help.
>
>   __             ___
>  /  )              /   /                  Bin   Zhang
> /--<  o ____      /   /_  __.  ____  _,   School of Lib. & Info. Studies
>/___/_<_/ / <_    /__ / /_(_/|_/ / <_(_)_  University of Hawaii
>                                      /|   808-956-5822; 808-956-7848
>                                     |/
======================================================
The OPAC at HKUST is Innopac, done by Innovative Interfaces, Inc. in
Berkeley, CA.  The same product is also in use at at least some of the
Academia Sinica libraries in Taipei.  Their experience there (that is,
at the A.S.) and ours logging on from here to the HKUST system, is that
Chinese characters can be displayed over the net but cannot at this
time be sent over the net to the OPAC server.  This would seem to be
a problem that could be surmounted by conversion of the network messages
to an encoded form, for decoding on the server end for processing, then
encoding again for the journey back to the user's terminal.  I have
received suggestions that metamail might be able to assist in solving
this problem.

I am going to send both this message and reply to the eastlib discussion
group, which ccnetters might be interested in, since it is devoted to
issues of East Asian library collections.  It would be nice if Innopac
and other CJK-capable OPACs would solve this problem.  Hence, I'll
forward it to Steve Silberstein at III, also, come to think of it!

- -- John McRae, Cornell

l   k

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