AW: [sword-devel] Marketing of sword initiative?

[Steve Tang]

On Fri, 14 Jun 2002, Christian Renz wrote:

> Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2002 12:25:38 +0800
> From: Christian Renz <crenz-swordproject@web42.com>
> Reply-To: sword-devel@crosswire.org
> To: sword-devel@crosswire.org
> Subject: Re: AW: [sword-devel] Marketing of sword initiative?
> 
> >* To reach out to Chinese people, word of mouth is powerful. One hurdle,
> >IMHO, is unicode support, esp. in Windows. e.g. 1.5.3 seems to move the
> >bible text screen down too much. My guess is that a Chinese UTF-8
> >'character' is actually a word in Chinese and is rendered to occupy two
> >character positions.
> 
> I don't quote understand what you mean -- maybe you can explain your
> problem in more detail? A 'character' in UTF-8 is always the same as
> in UTF-16, Big5, ..., or on paper. It is rendered to occupy one
> character position. The number of bytes used in memory to represent
> this character is a different thing, though. I am not aware of a
> concept of 'word' for any Chinese encoding. Indeed, splitting a series
> of Chinese characters into words is still a research topic (although
> it seems good progress has been made).

In alphabetical languages, spaces or sometimes marks are used to separate
'words.' On computer a character occupies a spot and browsers, word
processors wraps and formats accordingly. Let's not worry about
right-to-left or up-down since most Chinese are actually more used to
left-right first, up-down second kind of layout.

A Chinese character in UTF-8, 3 bytes, represents a word, not an
alphabetical character, and should be treated as such in any s/w IMO.

> 
> I noticed that when selecting a verse (via the book/chapter/verse
> widgets), the windows version would not display the verse
> correctly. This was true for KJV as well, though. But this is
> corrected in the new beta release ('F').

F beta does this right for Chigu, ie it shows the active verse and you
don't need to scroll back the window. I'm not sure we had this problem for
KJV for any release we've had though.

> 
> Maybe you can check out the screenshots I posted for the Chinese
> dictionary module. Does the rendering look the same on your computer?
> I use Arial Unicode MS right now.

They look beautiful. The modules I made myself also renders Chinese well
(I use traditional coded in UTF-8 and displayed with Arial Unicode MS.)

> 
> Or maybe I am overlooking something very basic -- my Chinese is still
> quite feeble (I am not actually able to read the Chinese bible fluently,
> that's why I did the dictionary), so that might be the reason for it ;-)

For this you may need the help from a native Chinese speaker. E.g. some
short everyday Chinese phrases translate into long English sentences which
doesn't always communicate the subtle ideas being implied. Some things
just don't translate, as a bilingual would know.

I've downloaded your module and see how it is before I'd offer any
opinions.

> 
> Greetings,
>    Christian
> 
> -- 
> crenz@web42.com - http://www.web42.com/crenz/ - http://www.web42.com/
> 
> "Thirty was so strange for me. I've really had to come to terms with
> the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult."  -- C.S. Lewis
> 

Steve Tang...