Subject: MS Word and Chinese Windows

From: Carlos McEvilly <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1991 16:42:29 EST

Today I tried to add a few Chinese characters to an existing English
document.  It worked fine; both with characters in text and in footnotes.

There is a problem with two-byte codes still.  The cursor movement
do not always know that the cursor is at a Chinese character, so back-
space sometimes only deletes the trailing byte.  What happens next is
where the problems lies: the first byte, which is in the extended char-
acter set since the code set is Big5, then sometimes becomes invisible.
This makes it hard to know when there are extra characters (bytes) on the
screen.  If there's an extra character at the cursor position, the next
character you enter, regardless of language, may be misinterpreted as the
second byte of an unintended Chinese character.  This could definitely
account for some of the reported bugs in Chinese Windows... in which case
they are not bugs, I suppose, but just one big bug that shows up in many
places.

Compounding this problem is the fact that it is very difficult to tell
where the cursor is in relation to a given Chinese character.  The cursor
position as displayed is not reliable, making it difficult to properly add,
delete, and block text.

If you do everything right the first time, you won't have any problem with
stray leading or trailing bytes of Chinese characters.  But you will still
have problems blocking.  Given these caveats, Chinese Windows still does
deliver at least some of what a lot of us need.

Carlos