Updates, Upgrades, and Accessories

Use your PC to Master Japanese and Chinese

Updates, Upgrades, and Accessories

Extensible and Modular

Smart Characters is extensible in several dimensions to meet diverse needs. Its modular design allows incremental updates, in which a specific group of objects (e.g., the executable program, or dictionaries) are updated or upgraded without disturbing the rest of the system.

Updates, Upgrades, and Accessories

Updates are new release versions of a particular software module or component which provides improved functionality, ease of use, performance, or stability. Upgrades are major improvements which significantly increase capabilities. Accessories are additional modules that can be installed or used in the Smart Characters environment to provide increased functionality. Updates, upgrades, and accessories are available from your software dealer, or from Apropos Customer Service(F- - 1) either electronically via the Smart Characters BBS(11- 3), by e-mail, or by mail. See Installing Accessaries(11- 3).

Dictionary Options

Additional dictionaries can be created or acquired and installed to provide specific technical vocabulary. The symbol set(D- - 7) can be easily extended to allow for large numbers of rare or obsolete characters which can be fully documented in a user dictionary(4- 7) or added to the general purpose word processing dictionaries. You can install a Radical Dictionary(4- 7) to accelerate looking up unknown Chinese characters. The optional External Dictionary(4- 8) interface calls an external program supplied by a dictionary vendor (or written by you) to provide access to virtually any dictionary in any format.

Font Options

Smart Characters comes with the 16 and 24 point Combined(4- 9) Chinese and Japanese font. These fonts are suitable for general purpose draft printing and faxing. Optional 48 point fonts yield letter quality output on 300 and 360 dpi printers. Additionally, simplified(4- 10) Chinese characters can be used by installing a simplified character font.

Driver Options

The DoubleByte TrueType Font Interface(13- 1) installs Asian DBCS TrueType(D- - 8) fonts designed for installation into the far east versions of Windows or Macintosh. Unlimited file size editing(4- 3) allows you to edit a file limited in size only by available disk space. The Text to Speech Interface speaks highlighted blocks of Japanese or Chinese text.

Conversion Utilities

Use the included ScConv(D- - 7) utility to convert documents from one document format(7- 2) to another. The optional ScDict(D- - 7) dictionary builder utility automatically constructs translating(4- 7), reverse(4- 7), and word and phrase(4- 7) dictionaries, eliminating the need to separately purchase and maintain them, while automatically incorporating your user dictionary(4- 7) into the inverse dictionaries.

ScAnnotate Automatic Annotator

The ScAnnotate Automatic Annotator accessory processes Japanese or Chinese documents to yield a fully annotated document suitable for translation using Smart Characters. U.S. Level II translators experience a three-fold speed increase using annotated text over other methods. Other products in the works include Japanese or Chinese to English translation utilities. See the discussion beginning with Automatic Machine Translation(1- 4) and Machine Aided Translation(1- 5).

Optical Character Recognition

Asian language optical character recognition software converts Chinese character images scanned from the printed page (e.g., books and periodicals) into text using an Asian language code space(D- - 2). This text can be imported to Smart Characters or other word processors, with or without an intervening translation utility processing step.

Apropos and others are working on PC OCR software suitable for home and business use. Stay tuned for new product announcements from Apropos in the areas of optical character recognition and automatic machine translation. See Using Optical Character Recognition(7- 3).

Need more info? Go to the Customer Service Page. Questions or comments? E-mail to Apropos Customer Service

Apropos Customer Service home page 617-648-2041
Last Modified: March 23, 1996