TRON News Items for February 2001

Personal Media Corporation put the third version of its true multilingual BTRON3-specification operating system, B-right/V R3 or Cho Kanji 3, on the market in Japan on Friday, February 9. The most notable improvements to the operating system are the inclusion of the GT Typeface Font--an unabridged kanji [Chinese character] character set of 66,756 characters that has the support of major publishers and media organizations, the telephone company, and the Japanese government--plus a revised version of the Dai Kan-Wa Jiten character set. However, many important improvements have been made to the operating system, its utilities, and its bundled software applications.

The Basic Text Editor, a system level word processor in the BTRON3-specification operating system, has been improved through addition of a ruby function, which was urgently requested by many BTRON users. This function allows "side readings" to be printed in tiny type next to characters that are difficult to read and/or pronounce, and it can be used in both with horizontally and vertically written Japanese texts. Although it is normally used to write Japanese syllabic characters next to kanji to enable easy reading of difficult texts, there are no restrictions as to what types of characters can be used, so tiny Latin characters could also be written next to Chinese characters, for example.

Other word processing features that have been added are: layout support for European languages inside vertically written Japanese (other East Asian languages can also be written vertically); a function for writing sideways inside vertically written script (e.g., writing two Arabic numerals or Latin letters side by side rather than one on top of the other); a non-jump line change function (i.e., starting a new paragraph without automatically jumping a line); a direct page/line jump function (i.e., a function to specify a specific line on a specific page to jump to); and a text loop back display function (i.e., a function that wraps text to match the window width and thus alleviate sideways scrolling).

Although it is unimportant in Europe or the U.S., the i-mode picture characters, which are used by over 20 million NTT DoCoMo wireless Internet subscribers in Japan, have been added to the ever increasing TRON character set. A new Character Search utility has been added to deal with the massive GT Typeface Font, but, unlike the Character Search utility for the Konjaku-Mojikyo character set--which is not included in B-right/V R3--the characters can be increased in size for easy viewing. Moreover, the BTRON Basic Browser can now use the full TRON character set, and functions have been added that allow the user to modify the default character and background and window frame color settings.

Other interesting features in that have appeared in B-right/V R3 are: a dictionary utility that allows users to input large parts of addresses just by inputting the seven digit postal code; a comma separated value (CSV) function for the Basic Spreadsheet, which allows the application to easily read in numerical data from texts; a Universal Serial Bus (USB) controller for connecting various peripheral devices; and System Selector, a popular software application for partitioning hard disks and installing multiple operating systems that even computer novices find easy to use. A complete comparison of B-right/V R2.5 and B-right/V R3 (Cho Kanji 2 and Cho Kanji 3) is given below in the chart.

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*1 Based on the second revised edition of Dai Kan-Wa Jiten, and thus includes 51,053 characters. The same character set in Cho Kanji 2 consists of only 50,225 characters.

*2 Includes Latin characters, Arabic characters, and the characters from various other nations plus IPA phonetic symbols and other symbols and marks.

*3 Intellectual property of AI-Net Corporation.

*4 Current users of Cho Kanji and Cho Kanji 2 can continue using Konjaku-Mojikyo characters by updating with only the Cho Kanji 3 system files.

*5 The USB peripheral controller is compatible with Universal Host Controller Interface (UHCI) and Open Host Controller Interface (OHCI). USB-based keyboards, mice, floppy disk drives, and CD-ROM drives can be used, but certain USB-compatible devices--e.g., MO drives, hard disk drives, PC card readers, modems, and LAN adapters--cannot be utilized.

*6 This is exactly the same as the System Selector utility available on the market for other personal computer operating systems.

Personal Media Creates New Web Site for Cho Kanji

Personal Media Corporation has created a new Web site, http://www.chokanji.com/, to inform people about and support registered users of its BTRON3-specification operating system series for IBM-PC/AT compatibles, the B-right/V operating system series that is marketed in Japan as Cho Kanji. Among other things, the new Web site has information about the features of Cho Kanji and how to use it interoperably with Microsoft Corporation's MS-Windows, schedules for training seminars, lists of personal computers and peripherals that have been confirmed to be compatible, sales outlets that handle the Cho Kanji series, development environment information and download links, lists of frequently asked questions and their answers, and references to press coverage. Unfortunately, this is a Japanese only Web site, so anyone planning to access it should have a Japanese capable browser installed in their personal computer.