NB Update

[Nathan Sivin nsivin@xxxxxxxx]

Dear Anne Putnam:

It was good to have your update on Nota Bene. It would be even
better if you were to let us know about the progress of support
for Asian languages. A number of subscribers to the XyWrite list
work in Asia, and others use Asian languages. At my university,
the number of students who take Chinese, Japanese, and Korean is
growing steadily.

There is no satisfactory method for input now aside from using a
Chinese or Japanese OS. Programs such as TwinBridge when used
with Word have bugs that make them poor for producing camera
copy.

You mentioned that character support is one of your projects, but
the picture is quickly changing. I wonder whether NB is changing
its plans accordingly, and if you have any timetable.

The main change is, finally, serious support for Unicode, the
international standard that will render the proprietary input
programs utterly obsolete once software fully supports it. I am
told that this is the case in Windows 2000 (AKA NT5). Does this
affect your plans?

Please keep us informed. I am eager to switch to NB, but it is of
no use to me until I can do Chinese with it.

Cheers,
--
Nathan Sivin
History and Sociology of Science
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia PA 19104-6304
(215) 898-7454
nsivin@xxxxxxxx