Re: Beginner's question + Euroscript.

[Wolfgang Bechstein bechstein@xxxxxxxx]

Nicholas Clifford  wrote:

> Nota Bene is well worth checking out; I use it along with XY4, as do
> many others, no doubt, and the files are interchangeable enough so that
> many of the Xy4 commands work with NB, and you can do cross file
> searches which will pick up both programs. But unfortunately, though I
> gather there are versions of NB that will do well in Greek and Hebrew
> and a number of biblical languages, it hasn't made it to East Asia yet.
> At least you can't use Chinese characters, and I imagine you can't use
> Japanese either -- is that right? If I have to insert Chinese
> characters, I use clunky old Word 95.

I wasn't talking about using Nota Bene for East Asian languages (for
which I assume Ludwig has no need). I mentioned it as a program that
might be suited to academic writing of the kind he seems to be doing. I
personally have never used Nota Bene and don't know whether it lets you
use Japanese or not. Since it's Windows-based, I would have thought that
with the right operating system settings and the right fonts, it just
_might_, but if it doesn't handle Chinese as you say, it probably would
have similar problems with Japanese.

Not really relevant to anybody here, I guess, but a long time ago I
actually tweaked DOS-based XyWrite to display and (to a certain extent)
handle Japanese text. I don't recall the exact steps, but it involved
using the display driver from Japanese MS-DOS and a small utility that
switched the active code page to 932 while _preventing_ DOS from
actually switching to Japanese screen mode (because XyWrite doesn't
display at all if the screen mode is Japanese). It was useful for
example to load large files into Xy and perform quick searches and
similar (the Japanese text editors of the time were much more sluggish).
But since Xy of course didn't know that it actually was handling
double-byte characters, line breaks had to be watched carefully, and
text input didn't work well. It gradually dropped off the edge of my
desk, and now has more or less only sentimental value. But it even can
be done under Windows 7 (Japanese version). See attached screen shot.

Wolfgang Bechstein
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Xy-Nihongo.JPG

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