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Microsoft has launched a system allowing users to change between English and Chinese characters easily.

  The Pan-Chinese Windows NT Workstation 4.0 is aimed at business users.

  The 32-bit desktop operating system is similar to Chinese Windows 95 and NT Windows, and uses an English interface.

   '[Pan-Chinese Windows] is appropriate to address a special use in a market like Hong Kong where we have mixed requirements of Chinese and English,' Laurie Kan, managing director of Microsoft Hong Kong, said.

   The system retails locally for $2,199: a promotion offering a free Microsoft Corporate Gold membership with each purchase will run to June 30.

  Until now, the only way to write English and Chinese on the same system was to run the two languages from different programs.

   Pan-Chinese Windows, which took two years to develop, follows the December 1995 release of Chinese Windows 95.

   'There are a few areas that the market has been wanting that the Chinese Windows 95 has not been able to address,' Mr Kan said.

  One feature lacking was Chinese characters adapted to Cantonese.

  Pan-Chinese Windows has four input method editors for Chinese text, including Hanyu pinyin, Cantonese pinyin, Zhengma and Changhie.

  These support the use of traditional, simplified and special Hong Kong Chinese characters, giving rise to the literal translation of the system's Chinese name, 'International Chinese Version'.

  It also features Unicode, which supports major languages.

  The system will be aimed at businesses in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and North America, but Mr Kan said Microsoft would not make a conscious effort to launch it in China.

  He said that was unrelated to last September's controversy surrounding Chinese Windows 95, when mainland users complained that word-processing features contained anti-communist phrases. The terms were not contained in the program but from 'one of the add-on features that were from an independent vendor', Mr Kan said.

  A home-user version of Pan-Chinese Windows for the consumer market had been considered by Microsoft, Mr Kan would not say if it was being developed.

  'Some people at home will have smaller requirements . . . Chinese Windows 95 will be more appealing to them.'   This did not mean that Microsoft saw the Chinese software market as an insignificant sector, he said. The market for such systems in Hong Kong had been growing rapidly.



Microsoft system bridges language gap