Radic v1.1 April 2001 1. INTRODUCTION Radic is a small and free application for the PalmOS environment that allows the user to identify japanese kanji by their radicals. Since there are a lot less radicals than kanji, identifying them this way makes life for the agonized student of the japanese language a bit easier. The program is based on the work of Michael Raine and J. W. Breen who compiled the original RADKFILE that lists all the JIS1/2 kanji and their radicals. Alexander Schonfeld, author of JquickTrans later added the english meanings of the 251 radicals. Radic is best used together with Hiroshi Kawashima's excellent KDIC dictionary shareware. To display the japanese characters a japanese language support must be istalled on the Palm. This can either be the free J-OS 1.9 or (for much bigger and therefore much easier readable fonts) the unfortunately pricy J-OS IV. CJKOS with its nice fonts has been reported to work too. 2. FEATURES - lookup kanji by their radicals - display the english meaning of radicals - edit the results to compose a complete japanese word - feed the found word to KDIC or KDIC_DA - use different fonts for the radical table and the results 3. LIMITATIONS Since Radic is based on the RADKFILE the limitations of this database do apply to Radic too. For some kanji (like the kanji "go" (language, word)) there are radicals that seem to be obvious (like the radikal "go" (five)), but are not listed in the database though. I have no idea about the reason for this, but I noticed that in my german edition of Hadamitzky's Kanji Dictionary these obvious radicals are missing too. So maybe there is a deeper sense in this. (If someone can enlighten me on this, please feel free to do so!) There is another issue with the font used by JOS and CJKOS. Some of the radicals with a lower stroke count actually display more strokes than the given stroke number. In these cases the shown character consists of two radicals and only one of them is the valid one. The valid radical can easily be determined by looking at the kanji belonging to that radical. 4. REQUIREMENTS - PalmOS 3.0 or higher - CJKOS, J-OS 1.9 or better J-OS IV to display the japanese characters - KDIC and KDIC_DA as dictionary for the found kanji 5. INSTALLATION IMPORTANT: When updating from v1.0 please delete v1.0 from the palm first. HotSync radic.prc and radicdb.pdb to your palm. 6. USAGE - Main Screen - The screen is splitted in two areas, the radical table in the lower part and the results lines in the upper part of the screen. Choose the radicals you want to include in your search by tapping on them in the radical table. They will appear in the 'Radicals' line. Delete them by either tapping the 'Clear' Button, or by tapping them again in the radical table or in the 'Radical' line. The matching kanji are displayed at the 'Hits' line. Use the '<' and '>' buttons to show all the hits. The status line on top of the screen indicates the shown page and the total number of hits. Tapping on a kanji moves it to the 'Collect' line. Use this line to compose the complete word with the found or manually entered kanji. Tapping on the button on the right of the 'Collect' line does copy the selected kanji into the clipboard and calls KDIC or KDIC_DA, depending on the preferences. If nothing was selected in the line, the whole line will be copied. The checkbox in the status line can be used to deactivate the search function. This can be handy if you want to add or delete more than one radical at once and don't want to wait for the intermediate search results. - Options Menu - Results font: Choose the font for the 'Collect', 'Hits' and 'Radicals' line here. Table font: Choose the font for the radical table here. Show radical meaning: Displays the english meaning of the chosen radicals. Preferences: Displays the preferences Dialog. - Preferences Dialog Action for collected kanji: Choose the desired action for the button on the right of the 'Collect' line. When choosing 'KDIC' make sure KDIC is installed and 'Get word from clipboard at start' is enabled. When choosing 'KDIC_DA' make sure KDIC_DA and KDIC are installed. Save: Choose what should be saved when leaving Radic. Table: Choose which table format (compact / sorted) and which scroll mode (snap to stroke number / continually) 7. HISTORY v1.0 April 2001: Initial Version v1.1 May 2001: - Fixed a bug that caused a crash when tapping behind the last radical. - Radic can run now from a flash memory extension. - Added a checkbox in the statusline to disable immediate searching. - Added functionality to show all radicals for some given kanji. - Faster search algorithm. - Added a cancel option for long searches. - Alternative radical table form. - 'Snap to stroke number' option for easier scrolling. - Replaced all occurence of the word 'kanjis' with the correct plural 'kanji' :) 8. THANKS Many thanks to Michael Raine and Jim W. Breen for the pioneer work on japanese computing and the compilation of the original RADKFILE. Thanks to Alexander Schonfeld, author of JquickTrans, for adding the english radical meanings. Thank for testing to Gunter Albrecht and Stacy Hartleben. 9. COPYRIGHT Radic, a multi-radical kanji lookup method for the palm pilot. Copyright (C) 2001 Norbert Siepenkötter This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. 10. CONTACT Radic's Homepage: http://www.geocities.com/palmradic I love getting email, :) so if you have any questions, comments, suggestions, praises or flames or if you are interested in the source code or know the answer to the 'missing radicals mystery', please feel free to contact me at: norbert@siepenkoetter.de Norbert Siepenkötter, May 2001