README

	By Ross Ridge
	Public Domain

	@(#) myjis README 1.4 97/08/04 04:59:52

	README for myjis.

This package is an BETA release of myjis, a set of library routines
for working with Japanese text.  See the file version.h for the
release number.  It also includes a set of utilities built with this
library, including one for for looking up words in Jim Breen's
Japanese to English dictionary EDICT.  These libraries and utilities
are still under development are not intended for general use.
Configuring, installing, and using this package shouldn't be done by
any one not willing to go to some effort to do so.  There is no
automatic configuration utility, and the install target probably won't
work for you.

You'll need several things not supplied with this distribution to
compile and use the utilities in this library.  Installed on your
system you'll need a reasonably POSIX compliant shell (eg. ksh or
bash), a modern version of awk (eg. nawk or gawk), as well as good
ANSI C conforming development system.  Not necessary, but potentially
handy if your system can't display Japanese characters, is the kbanner
utility.  Finally you'll need a copy of EDICT, which you can get from
the Monash University Japanese language FTP archive.  A good mirror of
this site to use is "ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/japanese/monash/".

To install the library you need to edit the files config.sh, config.h
and Makefile. setting the various configuration options there as
appropriate for your system.  Then type "make install".  Hopefully
everything compiles and installs correctly.  If so test out the
utilities by using the newly installed kl utility by doing something
like "kl -c setsuna".

The libraries and utilities can be configured to use either Unicode or
EUC Complete Two-Byte encoding as the wide character type used
internally.  It is strongly recommend that you choose EUC.  While
Unicode may appear to be the solution for all the world's
communication problems, the only significant effect it has on these
utilities is to increase their size by almost an order of maginitude.
If you do want to use Unicode you'll first need to get set of three
translation tables, JIS0201.TXT, JIS0208.TXT and JIS0212.TXT, which
are only available from Unicode, Inc.  You can download them using
anonymous FTP from the directory /PUB/UNIX/MAPPINGS/EASTASIA/JIS/ on
their Internet host unicode.org.

The utility pts is a prototype front-end processor (FEP).  Unlike
other FEPs for Unix it doesn't require (or use) X Windows, instead it
requires STREAMS based pseudo-ttys.  While only Solaris 2.3 is
supported, porting other System V Release 4 based operating systems
may be fairly simple.  It might be improved one day to support
BSD-style pseudo-ttys, however Linux pseudo-ttys don't support the
required functionality.  In summary, comment out the "MAYBE_PTS=pts"
line in the Makefile unless you're using Solaris 2.3 and don't mind
using a completely undocumented FEP.

If you have any questions, comments or bug reports, please send e-mail
me at rridge@csclub.uwaterloo.ca.

						Ross Ridge