homoLudens

Deng Jian Guo
solo-ed into the wonderful world of Manila’s Esoteric Settings and
explored Chinese text rendering before I could tell him that we were
working on it. Mindy Chiang
(Taibei type - equally intense) was back at him in a flash. Witness,
friends, the birth of the first ever bilingual Chinese / English weblog
international educational collaboration!

In the process of all this set up work, Mindy has tested four input
systems. They all work. And we discovered that Blackboard renders
Chinese as well. So the actual student-to-student communication will be
happening on a UC Berkeley BB site. When we’ve got stuff to publish,
we’ll have the kids throw it up on the blog.

Hehe. I never thought I’d be typing in Chinese. Hah! I never thought
I’d be excited again about improving my Mandarin fluency. Best moment
of the day: I was ranting and raving in Mandarin about the fun of our
Shanghai trip and one of the advanced Chinese students came up to me
and said in English: “I’m proud of you. You made incredible progress
with your Chinese in just one week.”

I found an old posting about a cheap fix for using Chinese character typing in a Manila site. With Erin Clerico’s help - ayah!!! - it works.
In Plug-ins, we just set the Esoteric Settings’ ISOFiltering to “off.”Then we inserted the recommended code into the template of the
site.  Mindy Chiang
is testing its usability with several different ways of writing
Chinese. We’re guessing this is only a temporary work around, but Scott
Young and Jake Savin have expressed some interest in checking it out.

Note: You may need to change your browser View settings to see the properly rendered Chinese.