20. Chinese xterm

xterm is an X11 terminal emulator, where you run text applications like less, vi and mc.

cxterm is an enhanced xterm that understands the Chinese character set and keyboard. It comes with the fonts needed and other tools, (such as cvi) which work with double width/height multi-byte characters.

Chinese character set texts follow one of a few different standards, so your cxterm is still a valid xterm.

I never knew that this was possible, so I installed it to have a look. And yes it's all chinese to me, so it was a bit confusing. However it all installed and ran OK, and it displayed various chinese letters. All the documentation is in english, and it appears to be a group of companents gathered into one distribution for convenience.

hztty is a separate module, included in the main distribution.
20.1 Two different file on sunsite CDROM's

20.1
Two different file on sunsite CDROM's

Oct 12 1994          1035 disc3/X11/xutils/terms/Chinese-Tools-1.2.XFree86-3.1.lsm
Oct 12 1994       2745520 disc3/X11/xutils/terms/Chinese-Tools-1.2.XFree86-3.1.tgz

Nov  2 1994          3766 disc4/sunsite.app/Chinese-Tools-1.1.README
Nov  2 1994        725210 disc4/sunsite.app/Chinese-Tools-1.1.bin.tar.gz
Nov  2 1994       1222175 disc4/sunsite.app/Chinese-Tools-1.1.dict-man.tar.gz
Nov  2 1994          1111 disc4/sunsite.app/Chinese-Tools-1.1.lsm
Nov  2 1994        814754 disc4/sunsite.app/Chinese-Tools-1.1.xfonts.tar.gz

/cdrom/X11/xutils/terms/Chinese-Tools-1.2.XFree86-3.1.tgz, is pre-compiled for your convenience, and arranged so that you install it directly from the '/' directory, not /tmp/pkgs_cd. Slackware does the same for its tgz files.

There are different versions, 1.1 has more docs, 1.2 is more tempting! The 1.1 is in the wrong place on the CD: /cdrom/apps/. This also puts it on a seperate CDROM, because InfoMagic had to cut sunsite into CDROM chunks. 

	cd /cdrom/X11/xutils/terms
	tar -C / -vxzf Chinese-Tools-1.2.XFree86-3.1.tgz

I installed one of these, and got a cxterm that behaved like an xterm, but also displayed Chinese glyphs, and had some sort of F3 key, that switched between different keyboard interfaces. Not knowing anything about chinese, I left it.

Apparently, there are different byte-code encodings for chinese 'big5', 'hz', character sets (and fonts) as well as different keyboard techniques. If it means anything to you, the documents should make sense. I got so far with them, I guess you would get further.

There is a chinese news group you can subscribe to, but it is general news in chinese fonts and character sets (not about cxterm). You can also try to read that using netscape.

There are other utilities, such as a big5 to postscript converter, which is shareware (it substitutes rectangles for certain symbols). If I was you, I'd pay a chinese student some extra cash to get your business computerised, and networked. You can recover the cost, with reduced phone bills, by sending personalised fax's instead of chatting forever.