Using msn and NJstar

Sorry in advance if this has already been posted… can’t find anything

I have been using NJstar for the past couple of months and it’s a great assistant for studying chinese. The only gripe I have is when I try to copy chinese text from msn into the program. The text, when pasted, is garbled nonsense. I don’t know about the difference between big 5 and other formats. What am I doing wrong? I just want to paste the text into NJstar and convert it to pinyin. Is there any other software that is better…Wenlin? Please help!!

Thanks

Try posting into a program like Notepad first, then paste into NJStar. It’s probably garbled because NJStar is mixing the formatting from MSN into the Chinese encoding.

You’d likely get the same results if you posted from MSN to a MS Office program.

Another possiblity is that you are dealing with Unicode and viewing it in Big5. I haven’t used the NJStar word processor for a while, but I imagine there’s a simple way to change the encoding. Pick UTF-8 or Unicode and that may clear it up.

i have the same experience with njstar. actually, wenlin is better you can paste the sentence there directly. but you need to purchase wenlin to have a big database of words.

here is one trick i did when i used to use njstar. paste the sentence to this webpage first babelfish.altavista.com/ and then translate the sentence to english (if you’re chatting this a great way of having an idea of what your friend is telling you right away) then you can paste the chinese sentence babel converts to your njstar. it won’t be garbled anymore.

Thanks for the help chaps. I figured out how to use NJstar with msn: Just copy text from msn and paste as Unicode text. Works fine. That bablefish site is handy too. I managed to get a copy of Wenlin and have started to fiddle around with it. It seems like a fairly unfriendly user interface compared to NJstar but then again i don’t have the manual for it. Does anyone have a copy that i can download somewhere?

Thanks.

I have no problem whatsoever with directly copying Chinese characters in MSN or Skype.

Try to use the format “Big5 text” in NJStar.

It doesn’t work for pasting Chinese characters in MS Outlook, though…

speaking of NJstar… my msn crashes whenever i use NJstar to type chinese (on msn)… why??