中文词典的Newtonbook 0.9!
What is it?
This is a Mandarin Chinese pinyin dictionary in Newtonbook format. As
you may or may not know, pinyin is the phonetic representation of
Chinese words, in this case, using Roman letters.
This dictionary uses what I assume to be standard pinyin romanization;
it's the romanization method I learned from my textbook. It also
assumes
you have knowledge of pinyin and Chinese sounds. If not, I strongly
suggest
you do a bit of research before attempting to look up words, as you'll
be
totally lost. Pinyin romanization is not difficult, but takes a bit of
getting
used to, and the explanation is far too complicated for me to attempt
here.
This dictionary is not complete, nor will it ever be as I have migrated
this and the Japanese Newtonbook dictionary into one comprehensive
project (see kdict). I don't
have
an estimated word count.
A note about tones:
Rather than typing special characters for every tone, I've just used
the number convention which is:
- 1 for First tone, or flat
- 2 for Second tone, or rising
- 3 for Third tone, or dipping
- 4 for Fourth tone, or falling
- no number for no tone
Here is a screenshot of what the entries look like:
About the Fonts
I was surprised at the difficulty I had in trying to find an
appropriate font. I needed legibility in both the Roman and Chinese
characters, which don't seem to co-exist. Finally, I settled upon Taiwan, which, unfortunately, is quite
large,
at 1.2 megs. Also, I wanted a larger font for the character
introduction
entry for clarity but Taiwan doesn't scale up to 18pt, so I implemented
Uni24Lite, which I think is very pretty,
but
adds another 664k. You can get by without this one; the large
characters
you see in the screenshot will be displayed in Taiwan 12pt. You may be
able
to substitute a font of your own, like UniTaipeiX,
etc. using a utility like Lily
Language Kit. I can't guarantee the results, though. And finally, I
don't know why, but simplified Chinese did not appear to be implemented
on Newton (I only just recently found out that my input
system was the cause, not the font). I had to use traditional
characters,
which was another reason I wanted to include a larger font.
Occasionally,
the simplified version of a character appears because it happened to be
included
in the font. When this occurs, both are given and the traditional
version
is in parenthises (see figure above, jia4).
What's included?
The dictionary consists of 10 packages:
You can download each package directly into your Newton, or you can download a stuffed file containing
all of the packages (160k).
A Few Notes About Newt'sCape-generated books
When you read these books, you will notice that the controls at the
bottom of the screen may be different than those that you are used to
seeing. If you are new to this style of book, this diagram will help
you
navigate through the book. Below is a screenshot of the table of
contents
book.
As always, tapping Overview lets you quickly jump to document
sections.
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Last
modified: 2002.6.5