China DOS Union

The GBK font file CJK-GB.F16 that comes with AW97 (CJKDOS) and the HZK16 supported by UCDOS/CCDOS97 (meaning the GBK-font HZK16 file converted by Mr. Mo, not the original GB2312 HZK16 file) have one major similarity: their sizes are exactly the same, both 766,080 bytes, although their contents are different. I just tried swapping them, that is, using the GBK HZK16 in AW97, and putting CJK-GB.F16 into UCDOS, and got an interesting result.

After the swap, both UCDOS and AW97 could start normally, and both could display Chinese characters! However, one glance was enough to tell that although the text shown on the screen was all Chinese characters, it simply could not form sentences. In other words, the displayed Chinese characters were wrong; there was obviously an offset. Taking UCDOS as an example, although a large number of GBK Chinese characters (such as Traditional characters) appeared on the screen, in fact UCDOS still does not support Chinese characters outside GB2312.

My conclusion is that HZK16 and CJK-GB.F16 have the same format, but the encoding seems to be different. So how should this be solved?

Yeah, how can this be solved? AW97 can't run under a DOS window, so I can only give it up.

Maybe the structure is different. The GB2312 part should be the same, and then afterward they may use different arrangement methods, but because the included characters are the same and only the order was changed a bit, the size is the same.

This is a matter of how the dot-matrix information is arranged. Each Chinese character uses a 16*16 dot-matrix structure, with each dot represented by one bit, so each character takes 32 bytes. But some Chinese fonts take the information from top to bottom, that is, row 1, row 2 ... row 16. Some Chinese fonts, however, use a left-to-right method, that is, column 1, column 2 ... 16 columns. So fonts from different Chinese character support systems are not necessarily interchangeable.
Everyone can try swapping the fonts of PDOS95 and UCDOS/CCDOS. The Chinese characters you see will be totally unrecognizable, because they use different methods of reading the dot-matrix information in their fonts.

Is it possible to write a font conversion program? I want to use GB2312 and BIG5 fonts in AW97.

I think it is caused by the different encodings of gb and big5. The way 16*16 dot matrices are read is the same. You can use the
method for reading fonts and building small fonts to convert them separately.

Writing a conversion program should be feasible. Just read out the dot-matrix structure of each character and then convert it, but this is actually of no use. The key is not the font structure but how the Chinese character support system processes the font according to the internal encoding.
For example, with a 16*16 dot-matrix font, row (or column) 1 is represented by two bytes (one byte represents 8 dots, 0 means no dot and 1 means a dot), then multiplied by 16 rows (or columns), that is 32 bytes, turning it into dot-matrix data, and then converting it into another font structure format will do.

The following is quoted from mys's post on 2003-6-4 07:31:29:
This is a matter of how the dot-matrix information is arranged. Each Chinese character uses a 16*16 dot-matrix structure, with each dot represented by one bit, so each character takes 32 bytes. But some Chinese fonts take the information from top to bottom, that is, row 1, row 2 ... row 16. Some Chinese fonts, however, use a left-to-right method, that is, column 1, column 2 ... 16 columns. So fonts from different Chinese character support systems are not necessarily interchangeable.
Everyone can try swapping the fonts of PDOS95 and UCDOS/CCDOS. The Chinese characters you see will be totally unrecognizable, because they use different methods of reading the dot-matrix information in their fonts.

That CHS16.FON in PDOS95 is the same as UCDOS's HZK16; both are arranged by rows and can be swapped.
It seems that UCDOS's 24-dot font is arranged by columns.

Where can I find that GBK-font HZK16 converted by Mr. Mo? I urgently need it!!

The admin's post is really educational. How did I not notice it!

The 16-dot font I have was taken from UCWIN GOLD. It can directly replace HZK16 in UCDOS/CCDOS97, it just can't display GBK Chinese characters. That's a limitation of the system itself.