On Thu, 12 Jul 2001, Edward Cherlin wrote:
I've already replied off-line because I thought this is off-topic,
but as you asked (and there are some part related with
Unicode), I'm writing to the list.
> At 06:50 AM 2001-07-10, Genenz wrote:
> >...Now a teacher from Korea told me, MS Word has
> >some shortcomings concerning Korean
> >and there would exist another word-
> >processor much more frequently used than Word2000
> >in his country. (He also complained about win2000 "their
While what he said about shortcomings of MS Word is still the case,
his second point (about the existence of more frequently used word
processor than MS Word in Korea) is not true any more. (see below)
> >are better choices for multilanguage apps and the net",
> >but that is another story not to be discussed here).
>
> Word 2000 on Windows 2000 supports Korean well enough for my needs, but I
> am not an authority on what Koreans want in a word processor. Can you get
> an explanation for us of its shortcomings?
For most casual needs, MS Word is sufficient. However, it doesn't
serve well high school Korean teachers, Korean linguists, Korean historian
and anyone who need to use Middle Korean and incomplete syllables
in modern Korean (i.e. anything that requires U+1100 Hangul Jamos).
Under MS-Windows 3.x, it didn't even support the full repertoire of
11,172 Hangul syllables in modern Korean and that being the case, it
didn't serve casual Korean users well, either (back in MS-Windows 3.x
days)
Middle Korean and incomplete syllables in modern Korean have been
supported by HWP (Hangul Word Processor: aka Arae-Ah Hangul) since 1989
when it was first released for MS-DOS. HWP had its own set of Hangul
I/O APIs (and font format) independent of the underlying OS and these
APIs enabled HWP to run under any language version of MS-DOS/MS-Windows
(when I18N of MS-Windows was primitive or non-existent) and to be ported
with relative ease to MacOS and Unix/X11. However, they also caused quite
a lot of trouble in smoothly coexisting with/under MS-Windows (making
MS-Windows, well, even more unstable). In addition to this problem,
several tactical/strategic mistakes by 'Hangul & Computer' (which used
to make HWP) including not realizing the importance of MS-Windows early
enough (similar to what happened to Word Perfect) let competitors (MS
Word, Hunminjongum, etc) catch up with its dominant market position in
Korea. I think a few years ago MS Word finally became the market leader
in Korean word processor market and has held onto it since.
Recently HWP was renamed 'Hangul Wordian' with its internal
encoding being Unicode instead of the proprieatary encoding it used
to use in the past (not that it matters as long as it's kept inside)
and is produced and marketed by Haan Soft (http://www.haansoft.com)
BTW, Microsoft (Korea) made a public annnouncement that it would support
Middle Korean in the near future (in MS-Windows and MS-Word) and it would
be great to get that support from one of major OS/word processor vendors.
Jungshik Shin
