A long time ago in a thread about Chinese keyboards, you mentioned an ultra-clunkt method involving memorizing a four digit code. Do you have a link to some info on that? I’m writing a report for my Comp APps class.
–John
Martin.
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Was it the 4-digit ASCII code (or some non-U.S. equivalent)? Or a set of any four or five keystrokes?
This site discusses several variants (with some links that I did not check out going further).
http://www.threeweb.ad.jp/logos/chinese.html
These sites seem to be selling the latter idea:
http://www.slangsoft.com/CJKhtml/CJK1.html
http://china.candidemedia.com/dispatches/three/featureb.html
Tom~
Wow! Thanks for the links, Tom.
I’m not really sure what he was talking about specifically, it was a passing comment in a thread long ago. He said:
–John
That sounds like ASCII ALT+ codes where, for example, typing ALT + 0154 gives you š. The Latin/Romance Language letters nearly all start with 0, leaving the higher numbers for Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hindi, and Chinese, etc. (although I have no map for the numbers and you still have to get the correct software to display the characters on your monitor). (Since the A in ASCII stands for American, it is quite possible that in other lands they have written the software in a totally different method, anyway–although they would obviously need to use enough ASCII to permit basic financial transactions to be transmitted into the States.)
Tom~
I just checked my nifty “Wapro Kanji Finder” (ISBN 4-05-103109-8) to verify that it does list those four-character identifications for each Kanji (plus for a few special symbols, such as Greek, the Japanese Post Office logo, etc.). This is necessary because of the development of EUC, and JIS, Shift-JIS (New and Old “dialects”) encoding of the characters. So, in a sense it is like the ALT+NNNN character mapping in English Windows applications.
In the main body of the text, the Kanji Finder lists in dictionary order the words with possible Kanji renderings and the codes for those Kanji.
So what’s “wapro?” That’s actually the Japanese word for “Word Processing.” [The “u” sound isn’t always pronounced, so “sukiyaki” is actually pronounced “skyaki” except by one group of homosexuals in Shinjuku who elaborately pronounce every “u” and “i” sound that the rest of the population doesn’t. Well, some of the foreigners in Japan use that too - lot of funny incidents in Shinjuku. Aside: Sometimes you can tell if a resident foreigner has learned Japanese from his girlfriend because he’s using expressions that only Japanese women use.]
Any Japanese word processing program will have the option for you to enter by this code. The Kanji Finder I mentioned above lists the codes by the words and also by the Kanji themselves. Two nifty features it also has is a listing by the table (numerically) of the codes; plus, the numerals are also listed in hexadecimal form in all sections.
For more information on this stuff, you can do a web search for JWRITE. That’s a free program for Japanese word processing on an American PC or clone.
But, it’s still clunky.
Cheers!
-Chip