Home : Chinese : Chinese Computing

Caveat: At the moment, this is by no means an exhaustive source. Everything mentioned here is based on the author's personal experience and has worked fine for him. All aditions and corrections are most welcome.

If you have a non-Chinese (a. k. a. non-native) Windows 95 or 98 on your computer, you will have to download additional software. MacOS And Win 2000 are multilingual, so you won't need to download anything.

In Windows 2000 go to Start > Settings > Control Panel > Regional Options and tick out both Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese language settinngs. Then you will be prompted to insert a Windows 2000 setup CD-ROM and all the necessary files will be extracted from there. Then in the same folder Regional Options choose the Input Locales tab. Click on Add button in Installed input locales and choose Chinese Simplified for Input Locale and MS-PinYin98 for Keyboard Layout/IME.

As for Mac, there is Chinese Language Pack which is easy to install -- that's all I know about it..

2-byte and Single-byte

Unlike Western and Eastern European languages, Chinese requires two-byte encoding, that is, every symbol takes up 2 bytes of information instead of a single byte in European languages.

GB and Big5

GB code is the set used primarily for Simplified characters in Mainland China. It contains 7,445 characters.
Big5 code is the set used primarily for Traditional characters in Taiwan and Hong Kong. It contains 13,523 characters.

There are also GBK and UTF Chinese encodings, but they enjoy much narrower currency.

Input type

Four major methods for Chinese input are:

• Wu-bi  uses the five corners of each Chinese character shape.
• Pinyin uses the Roman alphabet. It has subtypes: Standard Pinyin, Double Pinyin, Dai Diao Pinyin.
• Cang-jie uses the 25 basic Chinese characters/radicals, such as sun, moon, fire, water, tree, metal, earth, bamboo and others.  Cang-jie was the legendary inventor of the Chinese characters. FT Cang-jie is used for Traditional characters and JT Cang-jie is used for Simplified characters.
• Zhu-yin uses the Zhu-yin (Bo-Po-Mo-Fo) phonetic characters.

Downloadable files

Download NJStar Communicator CJK
http://www.njstar.com/communicator/

A plug-in piece of software that allows to view/type Chinese (+ Japanese and Korean) in your standard software (text editors, browsers, etc., but unfortunately not graphic software like Photoshop). No fonts need to be downloaded. In the Auto mode, it will automatically choose the appropriate encoding, and you can easily switch between the Traditional and Simplified scripts. Allows a wide variety of input methods for both Mandarin and Cantonese.

File size -- about 1.6 MB.

Download Microsoft Global IME 5.02
http://www.microsoft.com/msdownload/iebuild/ime5_win32/en/ime5_win32.htm

Click the above link and follow the simple instructions there. The page offers a choice of Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean (Altogether it is sometimes called CJK). The Global IME works in MS-Word and will allow you to type Chinese documents, plus it will enable character recognition in your Internet browser. Upon downloading and installing, you will be prompted to restart your computer.

As is the case with many a MS product, this "global support" actually supports not so many things -- you will be able only to read/view but not type Chinese, let alone create graphic files.

The original file size is about 0.5 MB, with the language pack (incl. Ming Liu font) -- almost 5 MB.

Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0 and the language pack
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/cjkfontpack.html

PDF files are used more and more widely both on the Net and for DTP purposes. The PDF format allows perfect cross-platform compatibility -- that means, you have a total control over the layout -- your files will look absolutely the same in any computer or OS. Acrobat Reader is distributed free, but you will have to purchase the whole authoring Acrobat pack.

There are many other brand names of Chinese input software. Please send your reviews and usage instructions for your favorite software at chinese.guide@about.com.

Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (香 港 增 補 字 符 集)
http://www.info.gov.hk/digital21/eng/hkscs/terms2.html

In case you need to read/input Cantonese characters that are not included even in your Traditional Big5 font pack, you can download Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (香 港 增 補 字 符 集) (1435 KB) for free.

Opera 5.12 -- Traditional Chinese edition
ftp://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/win/chinese/ow32zh-twen512.exe

Another good present you can make yourself is to download Opera -- the fastest browser in the world.

Just a few of its obvious advantages:

1. it allows to switch between downloaded pages using the Back and Forward buttons within a fraction of second (no more waiting for ages after hitting Back)
2. you can choose to download any page without images and then switch back on if you feel like, or even choose images that you want to see later
3. when you browse several web sites at a time, you have only one browser button on your taskbar, so your multitaskng lies lighter on your processor
4. its mail agent allows using multiple POP3 accounts

Traditional Chinese Opera 5.12 "weighs" 2269KB.