What's New in Wenlin Version Three

New Dictionary. Where Wenlin 2 used the first edition of the ABC (Alphabetically Based Computerized) Chinese-English Dictionary, Wenlin 3 uses a greatly enlarged and improved version of the same dictionary. This version is by the same editor as the original, namely Dr. John DeFrancis, emeritus professor of Chinese at the University of Hawaii, who is the author of many books, including textbooks for learning Chinese, and is widely respected and admired for his outstanding contributions to Chinese linguistics and education. (Wenlin Institute is solely to blame for whatever mistakes or imperfections exist in our adaptation of ABC.) The new Chinese-English cidian (dictionary of words and phrases) has over 200,000 entries, where the old one had over 72,000. Qualitative improvements include measure words for nouns, more detailed definitions, and new example sentences for common vocabulary. The zidian (dictionary of Chinese characters) has also been enlarged and revised. The English-Chinese dictionary, unfortunately, is still about the same as in Wenlin 2.0.

Dictionary Menu. If you've made changes or additions to your copy of the Wenlin dictionary, or you anticipate making such changes in the future, you might want to switch back and forth between your customized dictionary and the latest one; or you might like to extract your modified entries from one dictionary and add them to another. If you have a list of entries from another source, you might like to import them into a Wenlin dictionary. The Dictionary menu serves these purposes, and is also the new home of the Look up word command.

Font Menu. Two new fonts, one for Hanzi and one for pinyin, are now included with Wenlin, and fonts from other sources are also supported. The new Hanzi font, developed by Wenlin Institute, is in the classic Song (dynasty) woodblock style. It looks smooth at any size. The new pinyin (and English) font is based on the design of 16th-century typographer Claude Garamond, digitized by Rubicon Labs Inc., and licensed and modified by Wenlin Institute to include pinyin tone marks. If you have another TrueType Unicode font for Hanzi or pinyin, you can use it in Wenlin.

Handwriting Recognition. The "brush" tool is more flexible. It can be moved anywhere on the screen, and it has new options for keeping its window open (rather than closing after each character), tolerating non-standard stroke order, and giving a list of the most similar characters to what you write (instead of only giving you what it calculates to be the single closest match).

MacOS X. Native compatibility with Apple's latest operating system.

Unicode and GB Support. Compatibility with the latest international and PRC character encoding standards: Unicode 3.1 and GB18030, which encode over 70,000 Hanzi. (Support for the Taiwan Big5+ standard was already added in Wenlin 2.1.)

Radical Look-up Method. Look up characters by the conservative system of 214 radicals, used by the famous Kangxi dictionary and many others. Characters with the same radical are ordered by stroke count, and those with the same stroke count are ordered by the five stroke types.

Printing. Specify margins, in inches or centimeters. Choose whether to print page numbers and show pagination (page breaks) on the screen.

List Numbers. How high can you count in Chinese? If you're ever in doubt how to write and pronounce a number (up to ten digits), this new List menu command can satisfy your curiosity.

Options Menu. You can now choose colors from the full range of colors that are possible on your computer. You can specify a special convert key other than slash (/), which should be especially helpful to users of some non-English keyboards. The Smooth text, Tab width, Quiet, and Hanzi filter options are also new (all described in Chapter 2 of the Wenlin 3.0 User's Guide).

To the home page of Wenlin Institute