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
