[KS] RE: Han'gUl and Windows

[Charles Muller]

Gene asked:

> (1) I'm now using English Windows 98 and MS Office 2000 with its Korean
> support feature.  How do I get breves?

In MS Word, select Insert >> Symbol. A table will appear with characters. In
Win98/Office2000, breves, macrons, and many other diacritical characters are
contained in this table. Just double-click on the character you want, and it
will be placed in your document. For frequently-used words or characters,
you can use the Autocorrect function to automatically replace the word as
you type. For example, in my Autocorrect table, I have the pair of   Wonhyo
// W^onhyo (and hundreds of other words) included, so that when I type in
regular characters from the keyboard, the appropriate diacritics are
automatically applied.

For single characters, such as o-breve and u-breve, you can also make a
keyboard shortcut, once you know how to find the characters.

If you have a need for the full range of romanized diacritics (for Tibetan,
Indic, Vietnamese, etc.) you can download the TITUS Bitstream Unicode font
(for Windows only) or the Microsoft Arial Unicode font from my site at:

http://www.human.toyogakuen-u.ac.jp/~acmuller/download

> (2) Do I have to install Korean Windows on my PC to manage databases using
> Hanja?

Technically, no. Office 2000 running on Windows 98 fully supports Unicode.
This means that you can use Access 2000, and just set your font to a Korean
selection such as BatangChe, or to a full-coverage Unicode font such as
Arial Unicode MS. You may need a bit of time in trial and error to get it
working to your satisfaction, but the basic support is there.

> Any recommendations on a database program suitable for this kind
> of a project?

Any major database program, such as 4th Dimension (for Mac), DBase, or MS
Access will basically work for this. 30,000 entries is not so much at all
for a recent database program--they are usually designed to handle ten times
as much data. Since you already have Access 2000 which supports Unicode, I
can't see any point in going out and buying something else.

> (3) Do I have to install Han'gUl Windows to run all these Korean CD ROMs
> like ChosOn wangjo sillok and Sama pangmok?

You may have to. If you are not in too much of a hurry though, you may want
to wait a bit and see what kinds of language kits Microsoft comes out with
for its new Windows 2000 OS. One of the big claims made for this was that it
is supposed to provide widespread international language support. It already
comes basically equipped with many different IMEs (including Korean), and
there are supposed to be complete language kits in the offing, which would
allow you to change your system screen fonts to run localized Korean (or
whatever) programs. If this comes to pass, you wouldn't need to go to the
hassle of setting up multiple OSs on your system.

Regards,

Chuck




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