Hi, On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 12:46 AM, sparky4 insano <sparky4444444444...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Will there ever be any official support for the Japanese language in > FreeDOS?
At risk of stating the obvious, FreeDOS is free to modify, but support can only improve if someone decides to volunteer to do it. Presumably that would have to be a semi-fluent Japanese speaker with either a software background or else heavy sympathy for DOS. Until (or if ever) that happens, you're stuck with making do with what already exists (or doing without, I guess). I don't personally know enough (and literally nothing about .jp) to volunteer much for that, so all I can do is search around. While not all Americans are monolingual, the majority (like me) seem to be, due to lacking any direct reason to be otherwise. Nevertheless, I do have some (very small) curiosity and interest in other languages, so it's not like I'm totally content to say or do nothing. So you want to edit Japanese text? Dunno, can't try myself, but can you try one of the following DOS software and report back? GNU Emacs (23.3) or Mined (2013.23) or Blocek (1.4) http://na.mirror.garr.it/mirrors/djgpp/current/v2gnu/em2303b.zip http://www.towo.net/mined/ http://laaca.sweb.cz/ The first two are text mode only but have their own input methods for other languages. This means you can edit anything, but it won't directly represent 1:1 on the screen what you're reading or typing. Blocek is graphical for UTF-8 and requires a mouse (but I think it relies on KEYB supporting your language input), but I dunno how full the fonts are for your needs. Text mode is usually limited in hardware to 256 glyphs (although 512 is allegedly possible, but I don't know of any specific programs using it). A quick search implies that FreeDOS doesn't support DBCS (which other DOSes do??). Dunno what that even means in concrete terms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBCS I'm assuming you know more about the Japanese language than I do! :-) A quick search on Wikipedia shows three major writing styles (kanji, hiragana, katakana), not counting romaji ("romanization of Japanese"). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romaji FD KEYB does support Japanese, apparently, in KEYBOARD.SYS (see KPDOS31S.ZIP's jp106.txt and jp.key), but it's for cp932, which AFAIK doesn't exist for FreeDOS proper. Though DOSLFN also has a cp932uni.tbl translation file. http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/MICSFT/WINDOWS/CP932.TXT But even the relevant 8-bit (256) chars mentioned there only seem to be the standard 7-bit ASCII and only some upper 8-bit chars from katakana, which sounds somewhat limiting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana "In contrast to the hiragana syllabary, which is used for those Japanese language words and grammatical inflections which kanji does not cover, the katakana syllabary is primarily used for transcription of foreign language words into Japanese and the writing of loan words (collectively gairaigo). It is also used for emphasis, to represent onomatopoeia, and to write certain Japanese language words, such as technical and scientific terms, and the names of plants, animals, and minerals. Names of Japanese companies are also often written in katakana rather than the other systems." Apparently there are various Romaji methods, and one in particular seems to be Kunrei-shiki, standardized in ISO 3602, although Wikipedia seems to imply that modified Hepburn is used more frequently. "All Japanese who have attended elementary school since World War II have been taught to read and write romanized Japanese. Therefore, almost all Japanese are able to read and write Japanese using rÅmaji, although it is extremely rare in Japan to use this method to write Japanese, and most Japanese are more comfortable reading kanji/kana." So a copout (from a FreeDOS perspective) would be to say, "Just use romaji". But from what I can tell, the kana (hiragana, katakana) comprise 48 "characters" each (total 96). However, Kanji is much larger and our biggest obstacle. Even "Joyo kanji" is 2136 kanji: 1006 taught in primary school, 1130 taught in secondary school. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kana http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji Even if we were to restrict to that (2136 + 96), that would be a mouthful. But I guess it depends how low (or high) you want to go with support. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
