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Third-Party Chinese Fonts, Input Methods & Tools for Microsoft Windows

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Third-Party Chinese Input Methods and Tools

• Chinese Plus
• Chinese Star
• InChinese (for Adobe InDesign)
• NJStar
• TwinBridge
• Q9
• RichWin

Chinese Plus

Chinese Plus, from Kingsoft, adds input methods, fonts and tools to Windows XP and 2000. One of the additional input methods is the convenient English-to-Chinese method. Unique utilities include a character-to-pinyin converter (with tone marks), Chinese and English OCR scanning software, a Chinese and English text-to-speech reader, and the Kingsoft Powerword Chinese-English / English-Chinese dictionary.

The package includes thirty fonts licensed from Founder, fifteen each in traditional and simplified, including the Kai, Fangsong and traditional Hei fonts necessary to complete your basic set, plus Weibei, many other ornate and calligraphic fonts. The developers claim the product is in the latest GB encoding but appears to contain the base character sets for Big 5 and GBK. Installation instructions are in both English and Chinese. Prices range from approximately US $130 to US $300 depending on the number of fonts and utilities included in the package.

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Chinese Star

Chinese Star, from Beijing Chinese Star Cyber Technology Ltd., also adds input methods, fonts and tools to Windows XP and 2000. Additional input methods include English-to-Chinese and a full sentence pinyin input method called "Intelligent Sentence Recognition". (I have not compared this to the "Full Pinyin" full-sentence input in the MSPY simplified input method editor that is included free with Windows XP.)

Like Chinese Plus, Chinese Star also includes the Kingsoft Powerword English-Chinese / Chinese-English dictionary. It also includes several font editing and art utilities, and the entire manual is in both English and Chinese. The 16 included fonts are in Big 5, GB2312 and Unicode, but I have not been able to obtain a list. The latest versions, Chinese Star XP and Chinese Star MP, sell for about US $300.

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InChinese

InChinese is a plug-in for Adobe InDesign developed by AWT System, a very well-established Hong Kong supplier of publishing solutions throughout East and Southeast Asia. Separate plug-ins are required for traditional and simplified Chinese. Each plug-in costs over US $400, but you get what you pay for!

Although Adobe doesn't offer a Chinese version of InDesign, the InChinese plug-in transforms your existing copy of InDesign into all that and more, providing very sophisticated Chinese publishing capabilities. You can display your menus, dialogs and palette in Chinese or the original English. It officially supports Adobe fonts and Open Type fonts. This is a professional publishing solution, usually marketed to users of Chinese Windows systems in Asia, but the US distributors claim you can use this in English Windows as well.

I have not tested this, but clearly it's worth a try if you need a full range of Chinese features in Adobe InDesign for the price of a Windows system, one copy of InDesign, and one or both versions of InChinese at about US$400 each. (The alternative, I suppose, would be an Apple Macintosh system with OS 9, the Chinese Language Kit, and the Chinese versions of QuarkXPress 4.1...not versions 5 or 6. Quark's Chinese editions are sold in the US for almost $2,000 each in separate simplified and traditional packages.)

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NJStar

The NJStar Chinese Word Processor is worth mentioning here. Another NJStar product, Communicator, is not necessary for Windows XP or 2000 and in fact it can conflict with the Regional Settings in XP, but I suppose it would still be useful for getting Chinese into older software.

The NJStar Chinese Word Processor is an interesting package, a word processor optimized for Asian languages that adds to your system additional input methods like English-to-Chinese, plus simplified and traditional fonts, pinyin with tone marks, control over pinyin entry that may interest teachers using it as an educational tool, Mandarin text-to-speech, an English-Chinese / Chinese-English dictionary including inline "popup" lookup, and a tool for exporting text as graphics right into an e-mail message. Text can be exchanged with MS Office XP and similar Unicode-compliant programs via an rtf file.

The TrueType fonts in the "Pro" package are Song, Kai, Hei and Fangsong in both traditional and simplified, plus two more traditional fonts in the "Plus" package. Prices range from US $99 to US $329 for the various packages, from a version with bitmapped fonts only to "Pro" packages with TrueType fonts and text-to-speech.

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Q9

Q9 is a newly popular input method you might want to memorize if you are also going to use it on cell phones or PDAs. On a PC keyboard, you use the number/calculator keypad. The approach is similar to many traditional input methods, in that you memorize a way of inputting characters by strokes, but Q9 is quite an innovation in efficient input with only 9 number keys. (The zero and the decimal keys get used too, but who's counting?)

Methods like this require a very good knowledge of Chinese penmanship. If you didn't grow up writing Chinese, good luck. But Q9's speed is very impressive. About US $10 to add the basic Q9 method, and US $70 for a package of addtional features like fuzzy entry and a bundled dictionary.

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RichWin

Unfortunately, development of RichWin did not continue after Windows 2000 was released. Once one of leading add-ins for enabling Chinese in older versions of Windows, for many it was the only choice. Although no longer necessary in 2000 or XP, the developers could have offered enhancements such as additional input methods, fonts and utilities, but they did not. Three of their competitors have attempted this: see Chinese Plus, Chinese Star and TwinBridge in this section.

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TwinBridge Chinese Partner / TwinBridge CJK Partner

Version 6 of this add-in is for Windows XP and 2000 only, and is priced at about US $180 for a Chinese-only version and US $300 for a complete Chinese/Japanese/Korean package.

Once one of the only choices for adding East Asian languages to previous versions of Windows, Twinbridge still offers some value by expanding on the basic East Asian capabilities of XP and 2000. For example, although the TwinBridge pinyin input method is quite similar to methods included with Windows XP, TwinBridge also includes additional methods like English-to-Chinese that can be very useful at times. TwinBridge also adds several fonts and system utilities.

TwinBridge 6 includes 49 fonts, enough to complete most users' libraries, all mapped to the latest Unicode encoding (GB 18030) and containing the standard 13,000 Big 5 traditional characters and 7,000 GB 2312 simplified characters. They include the Kai, Fangsong and traditional Hei fonts needed to complete your basic set, plus many more including a zhuyin font, a zhuyin-plus-Kai font and many fancy printing fonts.

TwinBridge utilities convert between various encoding systems, and help with both Unicode compliant software (like the latest versions of MS Office and Adobe InDesign) and older ANSI software (even Notepad). It includes an ANSI converter, a single-byte converter, and even a text-to-graphics converter for use in software that will not accept East Asian content any other way.

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