HANFIND  
 

HANFIND is a Windows program which runs on Win NT, Win2000 and XP.
The program is designed to explore the Chinese database Unihan.txt created by the Unicode Consortium

Since Unihan.txt is very large, about 25 Mb, the ordinary word processors are slow, and will not in any case display the Chinese characters. In Hanfind the file unihan.txt can be explored from various points of view.

To download Hanfind (hanfind.zip) click   Download Hanfind .

In Hanfind the display uses the browser of Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), embedded in the program, with the encoding GB18030. There are problems in displaying characters in the two extensions, A and B, of CJK, and also in handling the encoding GB18030 which is now the official Chinese encoding. On GB18030, see for example,

http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/DrIntl/columns/015/default.mspx.

IE6 fails to show Ext B characters if they are encoded in UTF8 unless they are covered by "lang=ZH", which is done here. Otherwise all the characters in Unihan that are encoded UTF-8 would have to be replaced by NCR (Numerical Character References), since these do show in IE6.

IE6 also fails to show Ext B characters even if you have installed the new GB18030 font Simsun (Founder Extended). In order to overcome this problem you need to make changes in the Registry. See "Unicode Supplementary Characters" in http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/DrIntl/columns/018/default.mspx#ETC.

Neither of these problems affect the browser Mozilla. It is possible to replace IE6 as the browser by Mozilla. This is done by installing the Mozilla ActiveX control, available here, by Adam Lock, where you find a complete description of the procedure. The actual change in the C++ code that generates Hanfind is limited to a single line, where the CLSID of the browser is changed from that of IE6 to the Mozilla control.

The font Simsun (Founder Extended), which includes Ext A and a large part of Ext B, can be obtained by purchasing Microsoft Proofing Tools for Office XP or Office 2003.

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