Have you ever used NJ Star (南極星)?

[Demian]

I tried NJ Star Chinese word processor 6 (beta) and NJ Star Chinese word processor 5.30 (30-day free trial) yesterday. Testing lasted for a few minutes and then both word processors (along with WINE which I had to install to run these programs on Linux) were removed. This piece of software costs around US $100, and I think it does not provide any advantage over using native (iBus/FCITX/Windows IME) input methods on LibreOffice (or Microsoft Word). It might have been a useful program when Windows did not support Chinese. I think it has lost its relevence now. Have I missed something? Have your ever used NJ Star? What do you think it?

[Hofmann]

I remember this. It was useful when its functionalities weren't built into your OS or freely available. The only reason why one would buy it today is for the typefaces included, which are pretty unremarkable.

[msittig]

What Hofmann said. I remember trying these out (the Chinese students seems to install them on every campus computer) in college near the turn of the millenium, and they were a good solution back when multi-language support was not so great in operating systems like windows and mac.

Take me back to the days when I pulled all sorts of tricks to get MacOS 7 to browse Japanese websites in Japanese: hacking the system, browsing through a proxy site that turned all Japanese text into images, etc. Kids these days are sooo lucky.

Demian: I like your perspective on language learning. You seem to be very curious and exploring a lot of things that seem silly on the surface (NJStar? Wade-Giles??) but will support you as you get more advanced. Keep it up

[Singe]

NJ STar, wow, thats a blast from the past. Was great in its time but there are so many other better alternatives. Didn't realise it was still used much.

[淨土極樂]

This takes me back...

It's funny how they're still selling what is essentially a really poor Chinese/Japanese IME for such a steep price tag.

[grawrt]

I downloaded a free trial when I took a chinese course in school because my professor recommended it to us. Oddly enough when I redownloaded it a year later and it came attatched with viruses x__x uninstalled and realized there was an easier way to type chinese characters...

[gato]

Yes, we were still young when NJStar was all the rage....

How about CC-DOS, anyone?

[Meng Lelan]

NJ STar, wow, thats a blast from the past. Was great in its time but there are so many other better alternatives. Didn't realise it was still used much.

A blast from the past for me too, when I saw NJ Star in the thread title I almost fell out of my chair.

[Kobo-Daishi]

I just downloaded the new beta to try out because of the new Unicode feature, but, couldn't get it to work.

All the characters are bunched together.

I think it's a half-width/full-width problem.

Tried finding a solution on their forum, but, it seems nobody posts there.

As is, it's totally useless to me.

Kobo.

[akclau]

the name NJStar brings back good memories from my student days!

 

Yes I've used it, no i don't know anyone who still uses it.  There is a way of making Chinese input available in LibreOffice using FCITX, I've done it earlier this year, one of the thing you need to do is set the locale to Chinese (zh_CN.UTF-.

 

If you type in "locale" in the shell you'll see something like:

 

[xxx@xxx ~]$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

 

In bashrc or try add this line:

 

export LC_CTYPE="zh_CN.UTF-8"

 

then logout, login again (or reboot).

 

You'll probably see the display language change to Chinese.  Don't panic.  Try Chinese input in LibreOffice to see if it works.

 

If it works, then change the locale back to English, and write a shell script that launch LibreOffice with LC_CTYPE="zh_CN.UTF-8".

 

Good luck, that's all I could remember.  I switched back to Win7 soon after...