The JREADER program provides a PC operating under MS-DOS with the capability to read and display a text file containing Japanese characters (kana & kanji), with the option of looking up the displayed words in a Japanese/English dictionary file or in a kanji-to-kana yomikata file. JREADER has been written by Jim Breen (jwb@csse.monash.edu.au) and is an extension of the his JDIC (Japanese/English Dictionary Display) program, incorporatng many of the techniques from JDIC.
The Japanese characters in the text files can either be in the EUC, New-JIS, Old-JIS or Shift-JIS codes. Hankaku codes are supported for Shift-JIS, but not for EUC.
All the Japanese displayed is in kana and kanji, so if you cannot read at least hiragana and katakana, this program will not be much use for you. The author has no intention of producing a version using romanized Japanese.
The working screen of JREADER contains two windows. The upper displays the text being read, the lower displays control information, the dictionary and yomikata search results, and "help" information if required. The first screenful of the text file is displayed when the program starts. From then on most operation is by single keystroke commands.
The commands available in JREADER include:
Starting with the character marked by the cursor, the longest match is found and displayed, followed by the next longest, and so on. Usually the first match is the one you want. The dictionary display is identical to that in JDIC, except that each line is preceded by the number of matched characters.
When a dictionary search is initiated for text which consists of a single kanji followed by two or more kana, JREADER checks to see if it one of the common verb or adjective conjugations or inflections, and if so, examines the dictionary using the derived "plain" or "dictionary form" of the word. The user may then proceed with a normal search.
As well as searching for matches in the EDICT dictionary file, kanji compounds can be matched against the wsktok.dat file, which contains thousands of kanji compounds with their readings in kana. The original wsktok.dat file was compiled by Mark Edwards for use in MOKE, however the present author has greatly expanded it for use in programs like JREADER.
As with JDIC, the kanji information displayed is from the "kinfo.dat" file which is built from the KANJIDIC file.
JREADER is available from a number of ftp archive sites around the world. The master site is Monash University's ftp.monash.edu.au:pub/nihongo/00INDEX.html archive, where it is in the jdic26.zip archive.