Summary

• To create Chinese-language, Japanese-language, or Korean-language applications for Windows NT or Windows 95, you need the appropriate Far East Win32 Software Development Kit (SDK) and a compiler that understands Unicode or double-byte character sets.
• As a first step toward creating a Far East–edition code base, enable your code to handle double-byte character sets or Unicode, following the guide-lines presented in Chapter 3.
• The Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing systems contain thousands of ideographic characters. Therefore, entering characters efficiently on computers requires Input Method Editors (IMEs), which are software modules that map multiple keystrokes into single ideographs. Different text input methods are popular for each language.
• To support IMEs on Windows NT 3.5, your application needs to parse the WM_IME_REPORT message and its various wParam values. IME support on Windows NT 3.5 differs slightly from one language to another.
• The IME model for Windows has been revised for Windows 95 and Windows NT 3.51. It includes a single IME API for all Far East editions of the operating systems. Applications following this model can be IME-unaware, partially IME-aware, or fully IME-aware.
• Applications can customize IME support on Windows 95 by controlling the appearance of the IME windows.
• Win32-based applications can display text vertically using fonts whose typeface names begin with the at (@) character.
• As long as your application relies on the Win32 API, you do not have to write special code to handle hardware differences found in the Japanese PC market.
• Windows 95 supports Windows Intelligent Font Emulator (WIFE) fonts for compatibility reasons, but new applications should use TrueType fonts instead. With TrueType fonts, the user can define characters not supported by the system's character encoding or standard fonts.
• Far East editions of Windows support additional functions that are related to IMEs which other editions of Windows do not. It is possible, however, to display Far Eastern characters on any edition of Windows NT and to create a single binary that will run on Far East editions and other editions of Windows.
• Far East editions of Windows support different methods for sorting ideographic characters. Characters can be sorted in stroke order, phonetically, or by code-point value, depending on the locale.
• Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai written text follow special rules for breaking lines.