Help! Chinese Characters and MS Word/Windows XP

[Guest ciwei]

Help!

I’m using a PC which is operating under Windows XP. I have “Chinese (PRC)” installed as a language option. This means I can enter simplified Chinese characters using Pinyin but it has several shortcomings, I’d like to overcome. Am I missing something or do I need other software?

(1) How can I enter “traditional” characters? (There are Chinese (HK SAR), Chinese (Taiwan) and Chinese (Macau SAR) language options available too but the input method doesn’t seem to be pinyin. I couldn’t enter any characters at all.)

(2) Changing the Chinese font seems to be hit and miss. Sometimes, after entering a character I don’t seem to be able to change the type of font used. Or if I highlight a line of characters, some of them change font type but not all!

(3) Mixing in Roman character fonts seems to be even less hit and more miss. All Roman characters seem to come out the same – and when I try and change the font type, it doesn’t seem to “stick.”

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what I’m doing wrong or how I can go about doing correcting these problems? I’m not interested in entering a lot of characters at a time, so speed of entry is not a great concern. I’m wanting use this to create my own flash cards.

Maybe there is other (free) software available which will let me do this?

Regards

Ciwei

[TSkillet]

most people I know use NJStar - you can download a trial copy at NJStar.com and test it out for a month- the communicator is a bit buggy and will freeze up my whole computer at times, but the word processor works very well.

[niubi]

(1) How can I enter

[Guest ciwei]

niu bi

Thanks for the help - I can at least mix traditional and simplified characters now, which was the main problem.

ciwei