Japanese Kanji Terminal Emulator for IBM PC (README)
Izumi Ohzawa
PD Japanese Kanji Terminal Emulator for IBM PC, (KD + MS-Kermit)
[requires Turbo C V2.0 (or later?) to compile]
*** What this program does:
KD (for Kanji Driver), in conjunction with the standard
unmodified IBM PC MS-Kermit, turns your PC (or XT, AT, 386...) into a
Japanese Kanji terminal with support for the JIS level-1 & 2 fonts.
"Kanji" is a set of characters used to write Japanese text (imported
from China 1200 years ago). Phonetic "Kana" characters are also used
intermixed with Kanji's in normal Japanese text. Unfortunately, standard
terminal emulators cannot be used to display Japanese text because there
are just too many characters (6000+) and a bitmap of at least 14x14 pixels
is required to represent each Kanji (KD uses 16x16 bitmaps).
No standard PC video boards, even those with loadable RAM fonts,
can do this in the text mode.
KD (Kanji Driver) allows essentially any PC with a graphics adapter to
display all of these charecters. It is specifically designed to work
with a PD terminal emulation program MS-Kermit readily available elsewhere.
With this program, you can log on to a host computer to read messages
written in Japanese. If your USENET site receives "fj.*" newsgroups,
you can use KD+MSKERMIT to read articles in these newsgroups directly.
"Fj" stands for 'from Japan', and the newsgroups carry articles written
in Japanese. With a normal ASCII terminal, the messages in these
newsgroups appear as total gibberish.
In addition, using "Japanized" text editor programs such
as "nemacs" (derived from 'emacs') or "jstevie" (derived from 'stevie',
a 'vi' clone) running on the host, you can also compose/edit Japanese text.
For composition, though, you will also need ancillary software and
a database to provide a mechanism to INPUT specific characters out of 6000+
possible choices. Such Kanji input software also has to run on the host.
[I am not familiar with such software, so please don't ask me. I know,
however, that Kanji input software is available as part of X11R4 distribution,
under .../XJ/... somewhere in the X11 directory tree as contributed software.
Although the input system is distributed as part of X11, apparently, you
can run just this software without running X itself.]
With a little effort, you should be able to modify this program to handle
Chinese or Korean scripts.
*** To unpack:
[I have to use 'uuencode' because of files containing ESC characters,
and because the font files are binary.]
[1] Remove news header, and "---- Begin ..." and "--- End ..." lines
from each part.
[2] Concatenate Part 1 through 6.
[3] Uudecode the file to obtain kd100src.arc
[4] Unarchive the arc file.
[5] Edit makefile if necessary to modify "LIB=...".
[6] Make (with Turbo C).
[7] Install according to README.DOC.
******************************************************************************
NEW FEATURES of the updated version (V1.00):
* JIS level-1 and level-2 font support.
The previous version (0.9) supported only JIS level-1 font(3489 chars).
Now KD can display 6877 chars, all of JIS level-1 and level-2 fonts.
* Colors, line spacing, font access method, can now be customized without
recompilation. These parameters can be specified in an
initialization file "kd.ini", much like MS-Kermit can be configured
similarly.
* Bug Fixes.
[1] Clear screen on CGA did not work. Now it does.
[2] Back space does not delete the char to the left.
(Host does this)
[3] VT100 emulation is improved to the point where 'vi' is usable.
*** System Requirements:
IBM PC, XT, AT, 386... (PS/2 maybe?) running DOS 3.1 and above.
RAM: 340 kbytes as reported free by CHKDSK to run KD+MSKermit 2.32A.
A little more is needed for MSKermit 3.00.
Graphics adapter: CGA, EGA, VGA, Hercules.
Compiler: Borland Turbo C V2.0 must be used.
Each line can contain 80 ASCII chars, or 40 Kanjis.
# of text lines for each adapter:
CGA: 12
EGA: 20 \____ Customizable via "kd.ini" file.
VGA: 28 /
Hercules: 21
Because of this you must specify the line count to your shell.
A shell script for 4.3BSD Unix/SunOS 4.0 is included for this purpose.
*** How it works:
The program KD works like a "debugger" program.
MS-Kermit runs in an environment provided by KD, where all (well most)
screen output requests are intercepted by KD and interpreted
for Kanji escape sequences as well as normal screen control codes.
It also tries to emulate VT100 in normal ASCII mode.
This software is in the public domain, no copyright is claimed. So,
use it in any way you like. Use it at your own risk.
Enjoy!
Izumi Ohzawa [ $@BgBt8^=;(J ]
University of California, Berkeley
iz...@violet.berkeley.edu or ...!ucbvax!violet!izumi