A Chinese font for working with OpenStep/YellowBox/Rhapsody -the patch to existing KaiSu_pkg_0_7_tar.gz package By Hermann Liau June 25, 1998 After attending the WWDC'98 last month, I was impressed by what Apple did for last 10 months. Steve Jobs and his colleagues in Apple could pull the best of both Macintosh and OpenStep world together by extending the Rhapsody's architecture to accommodate the "carbonized" Mac Apps and to formulate the future MacOS would be. Although there are compromise to be made due to practical reasons, nevertheless, it's the best integration of advanced technologies across last two decades. The Mac hardwares also regain its glories of distinctive and superior design with excellence performance. The Mac's next-step is finally headed to the right direction. It's also the time for Asian developers take the Apple's technologies seriously now. The MacOS X is the best platform for Asian software applications, period. With the encouragement of Mike Chiang of Apple Computer International, the inspiration of Min Soo Kim of SoftMagic with his Newsman.app for Asian newspaper market, the advancement of international font and text technologies, and the support of Rick McGowan and Aki Inoue of Apple Computer, I took the initiative to continue the work I left over few years ago in resolving the Chinese font problem on NeXTSTEP systems. In the new patch, the rulebook of glyph-generator has been applied to the KaiSu font-glyph displays. The word wrapping as well as the cursor moving problems disappeared completely. I've been waiting for this moment since 1992. Now when I open a unicoded Chinese file, with the opening options (or the Preferences in TextEdit) set to "Unicode", the KaiSu displays side by side with Helvetica alphabets. Most noticeably, the cursor moves in the precise position glyph by glyph or character by character! Press the "Back-space" key will delete the whole character glyph (not just one-byte only). The display problem of two-bye Chinese font is finally solved. Happy KaiSu scripting with Rhapsody! The KaiSu's fontcache has been enabled as well, thus the speed of screen display are now greatly enhanced as long as it's in cache. Unfortunately, the current "cmax", total number of cached characters, on the DPS imaging model of OpenStep 4.2 (cmax=2,316 chars) is too small and so as the NeXTSTEP 3.3 (cmax=2,399 chars). The fontcache is continually over-flushed. Most PostScript Software RIP has minimum fontcache of 8,000 and some have cmax up to 24,000. I hope Apple will increase the cmax as an option in the future release of MacOS X. In addition, there are good news for people using the Chinese version of Windows NT, you can take the advantage of NT's Chinese Input-Panel. It works fine with OpenStep 4.2/NT! There are also indirect ways of importing Big5 text code into TextEdit.app as well. Use the Notpade 4.0 (version 1381: Service Pack 1) to read-in Big5 text file, then copy the content and paste it to the TextEdit.app. Some times, the Wordpad and MSWord also work. I say "some times", because the pasteboard on NT and the pbs.exe (Paste board service)of the YellowBox are not behave very cooperatively. Some one needs to investigate the misbehavior and fix the bug. If you have problem pasting text, simply reboot the PC and start all over again. After pasting to TextEdit, the file can be saved as .rtf or .txt file as you wish. But once saved in YellowBox Apps, the file will be in Unicode format, thus no Windows Editor can open it again except the Notepad. The new Rulebook of KaiSu Glyphgenerator supports Chinese/Japanese line-breaking rules, so that "." and "," and ")" and so forth will never appear as the first character of a line in normal running text. This is a "feature" of the line-breaking implementation in the text object. Previously, this kind of advanced feature could only be implemented in the sophisticated publishing applications. In addition, the Kerning and baseline features in the TextEdit.app and Draw.app work seamlessly well with KaiSu. Thanks to the OO inheritance, now every OpenStep/YellowBox/Rhapsody Apps can do the tricks which are only available in the hand-coded high-end publishing programs. Enjoy KaiSu scripting! Hermann Liau Email: ===================================================================== Files included in the KaiSu_patch_0_7.tar.gz package: KaiSu_note/KaiSu_patch_0_7.txt KaiSu_note/Unicode-example.rtf System/Library/Fonts/KaiSu-Regular.font/KaiSu-Regular System/Library/Fonts/KaiSu-Regular.font/KaiSu-Regular.afm System/Library/Rulebooks/Big5Encoding.glyphgenerator/Info System/Library/Rulebooks/Big5Encoding.glyphgenerator/Rulebook ===================================================================== FUTURE PLAN Now the first step of porting Chinese to Rhapsody/OpenStep is completed. But before users/developers can make a good use of it, we need to do few more things: 1. Add a Big5 item to the Plain Text Encoding of the Options/ Preferences setting for opening Big5 coded documents. ( i.e. set up an encoding popup with the specified Big5 parameters.) 2. Supporting normal copy-paste for Big5 text. If it won't work then add a Paste Special... for pasting Big5 text from other document. (i.e. converting Pasteboard contents into Unicode) 3. Develop a Chinese InputMethod module for various input schemes. Before Unicode becomes popular, most Chinese documents (on Windows, Mac, or on the Web) are Big5 encoding based. The users need a transparent operation to transport those text into Unicoded document. In addition, Chinese IuputMethod for Unicoded string is indispensable. Thanks to William Wei whom is currently porting his InputMethod program to the Rhapsody with much enhancement and Chiming Huang whom is working on the BUconvertor.app for Big5-to-Unicode conversion. Stay tunned....