Subject: Chinese 7.1

From: Martin Heijdra <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1993 16:12:03 EDT

One can find a beta version of Simplified Chinese 7.1 on the April World
System Software CD-ROM disk; this is NOT the Develop CD-ROM disk, one has
to register at APDA as a certified developer for some $300. If Chinese
is all you want, it might be better to wait until Apple publishes commercially
the Chinese language module: the Japanese one, just made avialable, costs
$249; I expect the Chinese ones to be cheaper (less fonts). Good news:
it's really a big improvement over 6.0.7.

Traditional Chinese is not even at the official beta-stage yet; it will
incorporate Panasonic Hanin input however, so that's an improvement as well.

I do expect a great difference between those products which will be 100%
WorldScript compatible, and those which will not. For the moment, the star
is Nisus, which has a full multilingual version 3.4 which even has language
specific features as kashida's for Arabic, furigana for Japanese, etc.
As they say in their manual, Chinese and Thai-specific feautures are still
lacking, and can only be added after Apple makes the Chinese language modules
officially available; they will appear however. Other programs are compatible
but do not support inline input; yet others (Microsoft Word...) are only
for the patient.

Martin Heijdra, Gest Oriental Library, Princeton University