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From: Florian Weimer <fw@s.netic.de>
Subject: Re: Wide_String, Chinese & Japanese text files
Date: 1999/08/22
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"Thierry Lelegard" <lelegard@club-internet.fr> writes:

> Does anyone have some pointers to these standards and to some
> simple free text utilities which can create a few sample
> text files with a US or European keyboard on UNIX (for
> test purpose, not production of course).

Emacs 20.4 plus the intlfonts-1.1 package.  It is completely free
(well, GPL), and you can (at least in theory) edit quite a few of
those strange languages with it.  Japanese, Chinese (both simplified
and traditional), Hindi, and even French or German, for example.
Major drawbacks: no Unicode, no right-to-left writing.  (If you intend
to use XEmacs instead: I'd recommend against it. MULE support in recent
versions seems to be a bit limited due to obvious lack of testing.)

Another possibility is yudit (GPL, too -- sorry, don't know where I got
it from, but I can look it up if you are interested).  It does support
Unicode (and several encodings of it) and quite a few languages as well.
Major drawbacks: it works best with Bitsream's CyberBit TrueType Unicode
font, which once was freely available from Bitstream, but this offer
doesn't seem to exist anymore, and there's no visual feedback during the
composition of characters (which is especially helpful to beginners).
In addition, the choice of input methods seems to be rather limited
in comparision to Emacs (the X input method extension might cure that,
but I didn't test it at all).

Of course, I can't confirm that one of these tools is suitable for
production use.  (I'm already glad if someone understands my clumsy
English. ;)  In fact, I doubt it.  Nevertheless, you should be able to
create suitable sample text files using both programs togher. (And you
can always hope for spam from Asia -- I'm getting a lot of it these
days. :-/)