Hello,
First my apologies if I have missed something already
available on the Unicode website that I should have already known, as well as
for my total lack of expertise in the fields commonly under discussion in this
forum. If anyone knows of a more appropriate place towards which I should
direct my woes, I would be glad to hear of it.
I work with Classical Chinese texts which contain
numerous characters not in any character sets I use (Arial Unicode MS; CJK
Unified Ideographs), or know of. I was delighted to see that most--if not
all--of the graphs I need are in Unicode charts. However they all seem to be
images, so it seems that I cannot use them. I need to be able to both
input and display the rare graphs in my MS system. As far as I can tell,
what I may need to do is add characters to my existing
character sets, or get new character sets altogether.
For example, in a website I commonly use to view
reliable, annotated editions of source texts www.chant.org (Chinese Ancient Texts
Center at the Chinese U of Hong Kong), I frequently encounter blank spaces
where rare graphs are located. (I have downloaded all their
fontpacks.)
Third-party layovers with "font-maker" utilities such as
Twinbridge or Chinese Star are too
unstable, in my experience causing frequent crashes. Furthermore they are
not always convertible to or compatible with unicode. The most stable setup I
have found for a PC is a localized version of Win2000, however the MS input
methods for Chinese are much too cumbersome and slow, cover only a
portion of the language, of course have no font-maker utility, and do not even
seem to be able to retrieve all the graphs stored in my existing character
sets.
Besides Chinese and Japanese graphs, I also need to
occasionally enter Latin or other letters with diacritical marks, such as
romanized Sanskrit (for Buddhist terms), IPA symbols, and others, but I cannot
always find them in the character sets I have. Some of you should get a
chuckle (or a groan) to learn that I'm manually searching through character
sets in "Insert (drop-down); Symbol..." in MS Word 2000 to find them. Of
course their location gets memorized after a while--but this gets more
difficult with CJK graphs! (They're not true ideographs, by the way--they
are mostly logographic.)
I realize there may be no easy solution for my problem,
but any advice would be greatly appreciated.
From a frustrated sinologist,
Allen Haaheim
