Re: tlug: Kanji to Hiragana soft

[Jim Breen <jwb@example.com>]

It seems that Rex Walters <rex@example.com> opined:
>> This has *got* to be the most parochial, pedantic, jargonistic list I
>> subscribe to!  :-)

You ain't seen nothing yet!

>> At the risk of offending the "show me the code" purists and asking for
>> something that I should probably write myself, I must say that I
>> actually miss the capabilities of your old jreader program.  The new
>> xjdic is lovely, but it's still comparatively painful for me to page
>> through Japanese text in one kterm and cut-n-paste unknown kanji to
>> another kterm running xjdic.  

Fair comment.

>> My memory of jreader is vague, but if I remember correctly you could
>> advance the cursor phrase-by-phrase by hitting the space-bar, whenever
>> you came to an unknown kanji phrase another keystroke would bring up the
>> corresponding edict entry.  Wonderful for people with kanji reading
>> skills as poor as my own!

Something like that.


>> paste into xjdic" process quite interruptive and impairing to my reading
>> comprehension.  A quicker way to look up just the kanji I'm looking at
>> RIGHT NOW would be really really nice.
>> 
>> I'm curious if you know of anything similar to your old DOS jreader
>> program that's currently available?  I'd really like to be able to pipe
>> occasional Japanese email or news posts to such a program.

The old DOS JREADER was fun, but it worked becuase I had TOTAL control
of the environment, even to the extent of making my own "cursor" and
XORing on and off the screen as it moved.

I thought about doing the same in X11, but:

- the (mental) overheads of driving X are pretty heavy
- I looked at curses, but it is really too non-standard, with variants
all over the place.
- I even looked a Motif (this was back in '92), but I'd had needed to
build a Japanese library myself.

Doing xjdic as best I could in a kterm with canonical processing off,
handling my own word-wrap, etc. was as much as I could handle in limited
time.

Since then:

- Gaspar's "yudit" has shown what really can be done in native X if you
try.
- Ben Bullock has built a nice widgetized dictionary package in native X
(still in test)

so I may revisit all this. Don't hold your breath; I have about a 3-year
backlog of things to do, and I'm off to Europe (and hopefully Japan) for
a few months, so I can see trivia like software not getting much
priority.

Jim

-- 
Jim Breen        School of Computer Science & Software Engineering
Email: j.breen@example.com                Monash University
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/     Clayton VIC 3168 Australia
P: +61 3 9905 3298 F: 9905 3574 $B%8%`!&%V%j!<%s(J@$B%b%J%7%eBg3X(J
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