Re: Chinese character & pinyin frequency analysis

"Richard" == Richard Wordingham <jrw0602@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

>> Then, upgrade your editor. If you're serious enough to use
>> Chinese characters, you should be using one that does it
>> properly.

Richard> Microsoft recently upgraded Notepad, at least for Windows
Richard> XP users. It now searches one's fonts for characters not
Richard> in the font you are using, so that problem has *now*
Richard> largely gone away.

Bad design. Font and characters are 2 separate things. A text-editor
should only be concerned with text characters, not fonts. Mixing the
element of "font" into a text-search is absurd.



Richard> So which editor do you suggest?

I use Emacs.


Richard> And can I sure be an editor will not normalise my input?

A text editor should NOT fiddle with your input unless you explicitly
instruct it to. That's What You Get Is What You Want.


Richard> I have, very occasionally, resorted to fixing Word files
Richard> by editing the RTF files as plain text.

Why do you need to do that? Because Word sucks?


Richard> And, yes, I do resort to editing binary files when the
Richard> need arises - the worst case was having to edit a VAX
Richard> object file to initialise an additional register.

You should be using something that's better than Word in that aspect.
Would you choose to buy a badly designed car and then be obliged to
fix a few screws everyday, or buy a decent car that have all the
screws working well out of the factory?



Richard> 3. It can be tempting to compact text by using a legacy
Richard> encoding. There are also message boards where characters
Richard> will get misinterpreted - I have had to enter accented
Richard> letters as character entities to avoid them being
Richard> misinterpreted according to a legacy code.

>> Use an editor that can do that automatically. :)

Richard> If you have one to hand.

Emacs. And if you editor can't convert between encodings, use a tool
to do that (e.g. GNU iconv). It isn't that difficult to write a
simple Perl script to do custom conversions, either.


Richard> Using a legacy encoding for compacting will also result
Richard> in one's having a pair of source and derived files, and
Richard> possible problems if the editor is not clever enough to
Richard> convert the character encoding declaration.

Write a Perl script and the process can be automated. Write it once
and use it millions of times.


>> Again, these ought to be delegated to a decent editor.

Richard> So which cheap editor do you suggest for HTML
Richard> incorporating ECMA-script ('javascript')?

I use Emacs.


Richard> 5. It's a lot quicker to type '&#331;' for eng than to
Richard> fiddle about with keyboard selections.

>> What are "keyboard selections"?

Richard> Selecting keyboard layouts. For small scripts (or
Richard> language systems using small subsets), one normally
Richard> selects a script- or language- specific keyboard layout.
Richard> This, if I want to mix Thai, Lao, Khmer and Latin-1, I
Richard> would normally switch between four different keyboard
Richard> layouts. (I'm seriously considering knocking one up for
Richard> IPA.) However, if a lot of keyboard layouts are enabled,
Richard> switching keyboards is as tedious as switching fonts.

You mean different Input Methods?




--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 ~{@nJX6X~}

E-mail: danlee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
.

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