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Up and Coming

Comments and Suggestions

Smart Characters is continuously under development, as we try to bring you the best product that we can. Your kind comments and suggestions do matter - if you have an idea for an enhancement to Smart Characters (or you have discovered a bug), please call or send e-mail to Apropos Customer Service and let us know. Your suggestions, if accepted, will appear in a subsequent update release (build). Check the Up and Coming flyer, ReadMe, and Bulletin files for a list of updates, enhancements, and bug fixes. You can obtain updated, customized, or experimental versions as they are become available by e-mail or by downloading via ftp or from the web.

In Process

Many enhancements are under development. Accordingly, some functions and commands in the documentation or in the menus and dialogs are not fully implemented.

Which Release?

Select Help | About to find out the release of the software installed on your system.

Squeaky Wheels

Most users use only a very small fraction of a product's capabilities. Others use a product to (or beyond) its limits. If there is an unimplemented function or command that you particularly want to use, or you would like a command or function to work differently, call Customer Service to register your preference. Because direct our efforts towards satisfying our customers, we need to know what is important to you.

User's Guide Updates

The following changes were made after the printed manual was completed: please incorporate the following pages (if any) and make the notes on the original pages as indicated.

Request Bar Input Method

The Request Bar input method displays Chinese characters on a horizontal bar or sheet (several rows of entries). The horizontal list bar format can be changed using normal formatting by using the accelerator keys, or by editing the horizontal list bar template file ListBar.sct.

Learn | Replace Glosses

The directions to the Learn | Replace Glosses command have changed. To use, double click to select an existing word that contains a gloss. Query the word, select it from the List window, and select or type in a new gloss. Then select Learn | Replace Glosses to replace all the same glosses in the document. This is useful when an inappropriate gloss has been repeatedly used in an automatically annotated document.

Learn | Expand Modifiers

The Learn | Expand Modifiers and Contract Modifiers commands have been improved to work with documents that use word wrap that do not contain the Level formatting information normally added by the Japanese version of ScAnnotate. You can add level information to existing documents by using Expand Modifiers to replace existing tabs with spaces, then positioning the insertion point within a sentence, pressing Enter, then Tab repeatedly to correspond with the level of the phrase to the right of the insertion point. Periods are defined to be at level zero (in the left hand margin). Increasing levels of modification move a phrase to the right one tab stop. Both of these commands switch the document to line mode, and repaginate when complete.

Edit | Insert | Character Code (Shift+F3)

The Edit | Insert | Character Code command (Shift+F3) inserts a character in a native encoding. To use, invoke the command, select an encoding, enter the code, and select OK.

Keyboard and Glossary

Early versions of user and project .ini files do not contain a required [Keyboard and Glossary] section. The file KbdGls.ini (included on update disks) contains a default section. Append this file to your existing user files as required.

New Accelerator Keys

The Zoom Window command (Shift+F9) toggles a window between restored and maximized. Format Annotations can be accessed by pressing Alt+F6.

Drag and Drop

You can now drag and drop files from File Manager, Explorer, your desktop, or any other Drag and Drop server onto the Smart Characters window to open them.

Format | Repaginate

The Format | Repaginate command applies formatting to the entire document. This is useful for converting documents from pinyin to bopomofo and back again, or when working with hypertext documents.

Line Mode and Page View

A new function now checks for a conflict between Page View and Line or Window view display mode, and opens a dialog to allow switching to either Page Display mode or Normal View.

Combined Code Space

New entries in Scw.ini map user font code space characters 0-49 to the 0:Combined code space range 7750- 7799. This allows adding the first 50 user characters to a concordance file in order to use rare Chinese and Japanese characters that are not in the 0:Combined code space 0-8229. The 0:Combined code space is being extended to map all the Level II Chinese and Japanese characters to the range beginning with 8250.

Enter Character Codes

The Enter Character Number dialog accepts native (JIS, Big5, and GB) character codes, and selects display of vertical or horizontal glyphs in native fonts.

Read Me Now: New Functionality

Changes to Tutorials

The feedback from early experience users has resulted in improvements in nomenclature used in the menus and dialog boxes. Accordingly, the titles of menu items, dialog boxes, and controls may be somewhat different from the printed tutorials. Except as noted below, their functions remain the same as demonstrated in the tutorials, and as described in the on line help.

Smart Characters for Windows build 22 introduces added functionality by allowing a document to be rendered using fonts from any native code space. This new functionality requires that the concepts of " typeface(4- 11)" and " symbol set(D- - 7)" be clearly distinguished. New typeface and symbol set names have been created to clarify these concepts. This new nomenclature and functionality affect the controls and dialog boxes that handle symbol sets and typefaces. Several changes affect the Chinese and Japanese tutorials, chapters 2C and 2J. These additional user's guide pages update the current tutorials. We recommend reading the release notes in Bullet9.msg,

Create User Font dialog pops up Automatically

The new Create User Font dialog installs and creates a new workstation user font symbol set and fonts. (Each workstation uses unique User fonts.) The dialog automatically appears every 10 launches until disabled or a unique user font symbol set is created.

After completing the tutorials, select OK. The procedure is painless. In most cases, the unique symbol set is created and assigned automatically according to the software serial and license numbers. The reference pages for this dialog follow.

Substitute Default User Font dialog pops up Automatically

After a workstation user font symbol set has been installed, documents that use the factory default user font symbol set "1012:DefaultUser" invoke a dialog to substitute the unique workstation user font symbol set for the default. Convert the symbol sets. The reference pages for this dialog follow.


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Last Modified: March 23, 1996

Copyright © 1996 Apropos, Inc.