WenLin3 and Linux

WenLin is a really nice program for dealing with Chinese characters.

It can be used as a basic word-processor. Inputting Chinese characters can be done using the Pinyin romanization system, or by drawing the characters. For writing characters, I strongly recommend a graphics tablet! It is also quite handy for reading Chinese text. Just passing your mouse cursor over a character will show the dictionary meaning at the bottom of the window. Clicking on a character will give a much more detailed definition, including ancient forms of the character and possible origin, as provided by the ABC Chinese-English dictionary (John de Francis). Conversely, passing the mouse pointer over an English word will show the equivalent Chinese words at the bottom of the screen, and clicking on an English word will show a brief `Chinese' definition of the word.

WenLin is available for Windows and MacOS, but fear not. WenLin3 can be made to run with the Wine, the Windows application compatability layer for Linux. Here are my installation and usage tips...

• WenLin can be run straight from the CD-ROM, just like it can be when running Windows.
• WenLin comes with an installer. I found the installer crashed. Make a directory in Wine's `C' drive. In my case, the resulting directory is `~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Wenlin3'. Copy the files Wenlin.exe and unicows.dll to the Wenlin3 directory. Also copy the entire fonts/, help/, w3db/ directory to the Wenlin3 directory. The text/ and text2/ directories are optional. The w3sound/ directory is also optional.
• An update file, to version 3.22, can be found on the Wenlin web-site. This update installer does work correctly on Wine! Make sure that all the Wenlin directories are writeable. This can be done with a command like `chmod -R u+rw Wenlin3/' when in the `Program Files' directory.
  • However, version 3.22 does not work quite as well under Wine as does version 3.0! Wenlin seems to crash even before it gets started. The problem is fixed by changing Wine to run in NT (rather than Win 95/98) mode. One way to do this is to make sure the line `Windos = ``NT40''' is found under the [Version] in the ~/.wine/config file. The culprit may be the unicows.dll file, since I think NT emulation does not need the unicows.dll file.
• When `drawing' a character, the stroke does not appear until the stroke is completed. This is not what happens under a real Windows system, or even Windows emulation using a program like Win4Lin.
• When saving a file, on at least one occasion I needed to provide a file extension, such as '.utf'. Otherwise, the file would not save!
• You can copy and paste from WenLin3 running under Wine to a Linux program. For example you can copy from WenLin3 to a word-processor such as Abiword! Of course, you convert the font of your 'pasted' text to a Chinese font. I think the cut and paste format is Unicode, although I have WenLin3's clipboard set to combined GuoBiao/Unicode.