Christian Wittern, Taipei
The Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association (CBETA)
is currently making efforts to produce a highly reliable electronic version of
the volumes 1 to 55 and 85 of the Taisho Tripitaka[1].
Early on in this project, it was decided to adopt the Mojikyo character database
as a reference for characters not available in the primary encoding, which in
this case is the internal code commonly used in Taiwan, Big5.
For practical reasons however, the reference numbers are not directly used
from the input phase, but introduced at a later point.
During the input and proofreading process, the operators need to have a direct
visual feedback for the characters on screen, which in our environment was
achieved by using algebraic expressions (like xx).
At a later stage, research assistants with a strong background in Chinese
traditional writing take over and look up the characters in the Mojikyo
database.
As might be expected, at the beginning it was a big obstacle to look up the
characters in a Japanese operating environment.
In fact, the operations were so slow, that we were forced to come up with a
different solution.
After some experiments, we found a way to input characters and use the
excellent Mojikyo search engine on our ordinary office computers, most of which
run the Traditional Chinese version of Microsoft Windows.
We were even able to use Chinese Input methods, which was a great relief to the
staff working on this.
Besides the Mojikyo software and the operating system, this requires an
additional third party software from NJStar Software corporation, which is
called NanjiStar Communicator.[2]
I will describe the necessary installation steps in some detail here, so that
others will be able to use the Mojikyo software in a similar way.
To install the evaluation version, just execute the file after downloading a screen similar to figure 1 will appear, similarly if you purchased a copy, just run the file setup.exe on the first disk and you will see the same screen.
Figure 1: The installation screen of NJStar Communicator
Proceed through the setup as usual and answer the questions as suggested by
the program.
I selected full installation, which makes sure that the Chinese input files are
installed.
Now you are ready to install the Mojikyo program.
The best is to first start NJStar Communicator and switch to Japanese display
(either with automatic detection, or with shifted JIS).
After inserting the Mojikyo CD-ROM, the screen will look like this (This is
version 2 of the software, later versions may look slightly different):
Figure 2: The Mojikyo installation screen
First select the second item to install the database software.
Don’t be surprised to see a screen that looks like in Figure 3.
Apparently, some of the characters can not be displayed.
Figure 3: The first step in the installation
The best thing is, to just ignore the other things and press the button
labeled (N).
You will then, as in Figure 4, be asked to input your serial number.
Figure 4: Here you have to input your serial number.
If you typed it correctly, the familiar (N) button will become black and active and you will press it to continue to the screen shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5: Select the destination
Now here is your full attention required.
Don’t just press (N) to continue! You will have to change the destination
path to something that does not contain Japanese Kanji.
Press the button labeled (R) to select a different destination.
I usually just change it to Mojikyo as in Figure 6:
Figure 6: The changed destination path.
You are now almost done.
The setup program will finish with a message reminding you to install the
Truetype fonts required for proper operation.
In order to install them properly, you will need to either install a recent
version of Microsoft Office or separately install some Japanese fonts from
Microsofts website.
Either will install some files that are needed to support Japanese Truetype
fonts on non-Japanese systems and the fonts bundled with the Mojikyo software
need this support.
You are then ready to install the Truetype fonts by selecting the third item in
the screen shown in Figure 1.
During the setup process, the Mojikyo setup program will also ask you whether
you would like to have a shortcut on your desktop.
No matter how you answered to this, there will be neither a shortcut on the
desktop nor a new entry in the Start menu, so the best is to create a desktop
shortcut yourself.
Figure 7 The Mojikyo folder in the Program Files folder
To create this shortcut, find the file mojikyo.exe in the folder you named
above (I called it Mojikyo,as shown in Figure 7).
Click on this file with the right mouse button and select the entry as shown in
Figure 8.
Figure 8: Create the shortcut for the Mojikyo program
Figure 9 Input to Mojikyo from NJStar Communicator
Now we finally come to the point to actually use the Mojikyo database program
to search for some characters.
For the input to work smoothly open the Chinese input in NJStar Communicator (to
do this: move your mouse to the area right of the red 
character.
You will see a couple of icons: 
.
Click the third one which looks like a keyboard with a star and select Chinese
input.
You will see a new input line opening up next to the taskbar at the bottom of
the screen.
You can change to a different input method by clicking on 
.
This will show you some input methods, you can select more from a list available
through 
.
Now, very important:
The Mojikyo database expects the characters to arrive in shifted JIS encoding.
No matter what encoding you use, be sure to click on the rightmost button in the
input line and change it to SJIS as shown in Figure 9.
Figure 10: Selecting the character parts
You are now ready to select the characters you need and use the Mojikyo
database as usual without much extra effort. Input can be done through any of
NJStar Communicators input methods (which also includes the Four Corner Input
system), all of them can be mapped to SJIS as output.
Sometimes however, you might come across a character that does not exist in JIS.
In this case, it is best to think of some other character which has the same
parts.
In most cases, it is advisable to turn off NJStars own display of Asian
characters by switching it to ANSI / No CJK as shown in Figure 8-10.
This only affects the display (which is handled by the operating system and the
Mojikyo program anyway) and not the input.
Unfortunately, I have not been able to set up the programs in a similar way
for an English version of Windows.
So far, this method therefore seems to be restricted to Traditional Chinese
Windows and maybe other Asian versions.
[1] More information is available at http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/cbeta/
.
[2] An evaluation version of this software is available for
download at the website http://www.njstar.com.
The version used here is 2.00.