Options and Settings
JWPce has a number of options that can be used to configure the program for different individual tastes.
Introduction and Concepts
The Options dialog box contains most of the settings that control how JWPce works*. Many of these options have been discussed elsewhere in the manual, but all will be touched on in this section.
Normally, the options settings (actually the settings for the entire configuration) are saved whenever you exit JWPce. This option can be disabled by clearing the Save Settings on Exit checkbox on the General page of the Options dialog box. If auto-save of the options has been disabled, or you want to save the options before exiting the program, you can save the current settings immediately with the Utilities/Save Settings command.
All settings for JWPce can be restored to the default configuration with the Utilities/Default Settings menu command. This command resets all options to their default values, including the dictionary options, the general Page Layout, and all the Options settings.
The Options dialog box can be accessed form the Utilities/Options... menu command (Ctrl+O), or by selecting the Options button from the toolbar. This chapter discusses each page of this multi-page dialog box.
Related Topics
* Almost all settings related to the dictionary are located in the Dictionary Options dialog box. Further, most of the printer options, and options specific to each file, are located in the Page Layout dialog box (Utilities/Page Layout or Alt+L). There are also a few odd options that only affect the kanji lookup systems that are located in the lookup dialogs.
General Options
The General page contains options that effect the entire program.
The Startup Options section allows you to control aspects of the startup process:
- Restore Window Position: If this is selected, JWPce will open its window to the same size and position (and monitor) as it was last time you closed JWPce. This option only functions if the Save Settings on Exit options is selected. (Off by default.)
- Reload Previous Files: If this is selected, when you start JWPce it reloads all the files that you were working with when you last closed JWPce. This allows you to recover your working environment quickly. (On by default.)
The Termination Options section controls actions JWPce takes when terminating:
- Save Settings on Exit: When selected, JWPce will save all the option settings whenever you exit the program. This keeps your configuration settings current. The alternative is to use the Utilities/Save Options command to save the settings by hand. (On by default.)
- Confirm Exit on Last File: Normally JWPce will terminate if you close the last file. If this option is selected, JWPce will request confirmation before terminating.
The Line Width options determine how JWPce determines the line width for the screen. It has no effect on the printer:
option line width Dynamic Determined by the width of the display window (default) Fixed Determined by a fixed value that you enter Printer Determined by the currently selected printer The Close Button options determine the action taken when you click the close button:
option action Close File Close the current file (default) Close Program Close the entire program The Units section determines the type of units used to measure distances:
option units inches Inches (default) cm centimeter The following two options are only available on Windows CE PPC devices. These options change the way the up and down buttons work on a PPC. By default, these buttons move the cursor up or down a single line. By selecting these options you can move up and down a page at a time (a screen minus one line). For one-handed operation, the page modes may be more convenient.
Page Scroll, Files Uses page mode for moving around in a file. Page Scroll, Lists Uses page mode for moving around in lists (including the dictionary).
Display Options
The display options allow you to control various aspects of the display:
Scroll Bars
- Vertical Scroll Bar: Enables the vertical scroll bar in the main text area (default on).
- Horizontal Scroll Bar: Enables the horizontal scroll bar in the main text area. Technically, this should not be necessary if you are using the Dynamic line width option, since the line width then always matches the window size (default on).
- Kanji List Scroll Bar: Enables the horizontal scroll bar in the kanji bar (default on).
Status/Kanji Bar
- Status Bar: Enables the status bar (default on).
- Kanji Bar: Enables the kanji bar (default on).
- Kanji-bar at Top: Places the kanji bar at the top of the display, not at the bottom (default off).
If Auto-Scroll is enabled, when the mouse (or pointer) is moved to the top or bottom of a file or list, JWPce will automatically scroll through the file or list. This makes it possible to select more text than is visible in the display. Auto-Scroll is enabled by default, but you can disable it. You can also adjust the speed of the scroll. 100 is the default speed, but lowering the value the display will scroll faster, and increasing the value will scroll the display faster.
The final option determines the Highlight Color, which is the color that JWPce uses to draw attention to text information in Japanese list boxes. This is used in the Character Information dialog box, in the Dictionaries dialog box, and when displaying user dictionary entries. (Red by default.)
Related Topics
Font/Format Options
This dialog contains font and some formatting information.
The Relax Paragraph Format section determines when JWPce may place characters in the right margin.
- Punctuation: This option allows JWPce to modify the paragraph formatting by placing some punctuation (most of the punctuation characters rendered on the left side of the character box) in the margins, so JWPce can avoid having to begin a line with punctuation. (On by default.)
- Small kana: This allows JWPce to modify the paragraph formatting by placing small kana in the right margin, to avoid having to begin a line with a small kana.
The fonts sections determine the type of fonts used. JWPce allows you to choose a Japanese display (screen) font, a Japanese printer font, as well as an ASCII (English) font.
ASCII Font
You do not choose the size of the ASCII font, instead JWPce matches it to the size of the Japanese font you are using. Further, since JWPce only allows TrueType ASCII fonts (except on Windows CE devices that do not support TrueType fonts), the same font is automatically used for both the display and printer. The ASCII Font drop-list allows you to choose the ASCII font face.
Kanji Font
This section controls the kanji fonts used by different parts of the programs. Each font has a specific use. JWPce arranges the fonts used by the system in a hierarchy. Each font has particular characteristics, but can be set to Automatic Selection. In automatic mode, the characteristics of a font are determined by the parent font. The following table shows the font relationships.
From this chart we can see that the system font is the root font, and all other fonts can be determined from it. The edit, file, and jis fonts are determined directly from the system font. The list and bar fonts are determined from the edit font, whereas the clip, print and big fonts are determined from the file font.
The following table indicates the usage for each of the fonts:
Font Description System Root font. This is used to render system text in Japanese. This should remain a relatively small font, or you may have trouble with dialog boxes. Default is k16x16.f00. Edit Font used for Japanese edit controls. Derived from the system font. Making this font too big can cause rendering problems in dialog boxes. Default is auto k16x16.f00. List Font used for Japanese list controls. Derived from the edit font. This font can be safely made any size you desire (within reason). Default is auto k16x16.f00 Bar Font used for rendering all kanji bars. This includes the kanji bar on the main display, as well as the kanji bars used in the kanji lookups. Making this font too big can cause display problems in some dialog boxes. Default is auto k16x16.f00 File Base font used to render text in a file. This font is derived from the system font and can safely be made any size. Default is auto k16x16.f00. Clip Font used to render text on the clipboard. This font is derived from the file font and can be made any size. Using a larger font on the clipboard and reducing the image size can result in higher quality printing. Making this font vertical will cause the clipboard text to be rendered in vertical form instead of horizontal form. Default is auto k16x16.f00 Used to render to a printer. This font is derived from the file font, and can be made any size. Unlike all other fonts, the size of this font is specified in points, which translate to a specific size on the printer. All other fonts are specified in pixel. Vertical printing is supported by JWPce, but is not selected by setting the print font to vertical. Vertical printing is set in the page layout for the file. Default is auto k48x48.f00. Big Font used to render the large kanji in the Character Information dialog. This font is derived from the file font. You cannot set the size of this font, JWPce will automatically adjust the size of the font to fill the space for the large kanji. It is particularly good to have a TrueType font for this one. Default is auto k48x48.f00. JIS Font used to render the JIS table. This font is derived from the system font. You cannot adjust the size of this font. JWPce requires that this font is 16 pixels high. Default is auto k16x16.f00. To set a font, first select the font you want to adjust with the Font control. By default most fonts are set to Automatic Selection, which means JWPce chooses the font for you. If you disable the Automatic Selection control, you will be able to set the font:
Choose Font Provides a list of all fonts that specify they support Japanese text. Often UNICODE fonts support many languages and do not specify Japanese support. You can select Show All Fonts to see all of the fonts. Pixels/Points Indicates the size of the font. Most fonts are specified in terms of pixels (dots on the screen). The print font is specified in terms of points. A point is 1/72* of an inch, and specifies the actual height of characters on the page. You cannot set the size on the big or JIS font. The JIS font is always 16 pixels high. JWPce will automatically set the size of the big font to match the size of the display. Vertical This option can only be selected for the clipboard font. Selecting this option will cause the clipboard bitmapped image to be rendered in vertical mode. The Show All Fonts checkbox will show all possible TrueType fonts in the Choose Font list. This can be used to select a font that your know contains Japanese encoding, but do not show in the font list. In order to make it easier to select a Japanese font, JWPce tries to show only fonts that have Japanese support. Some UNICODE fonts support a wide range of languages and thus do not indicate support of Japanese characters. These fonts will not normally be included in the font list, so you may have to select the Show All Fonts option. If you select a font that actually does not contain Japanese glyphs, JWPce will have the system to provide the “closest” font with Japanese glyphs. If Windows is not able to find a font with Japanese glyphs (often a problem on Windows CE machines), JWPce will display boxes wherever a Japanese character is located.
TrueType Japanese fonts are supported on Windows CE devices that support TrueType fonts (not all do). As of the time this manual was written, many Windows CE devices did not correctly recognize Japanese TrueType fonts, so to select such a font the Show All Fonts checkbox must be used.
Tip: You can sometimes get faster printing using a lower resolution font (how much faster depends on the specific printer and print-driver you are using). In such cases, you may want to print draft material at a lower resolution. Actually, the 16x16 base font prints quite well in JWPce.
WARNING! Vertical printing is only supported for TrueType fonts that contain a vertical glyph substitution table (this should be included in all fonts, but you never know). If you use a TrueType font without such a table, JWPce will default to using the bitmapped fonts for vertical printing.Related Topics
- Using the Clipboard
- Printing Options and Fonts
- Fonts
- Fonts Introduction
- Choosing an ASCII Font
- Choosing a Japanese Display Font
- Choosing a Japanese Printer Font
* A point is really 1/72.27", but most computers treat it as 1/72".
File/Clipboard Options
The File/Clipboard options relate to working with files as well as setting the clipboard import and export formats.
The file options are:
Duplicate Files: Determines what to do when you attempt to open a file that is already open.
- Open Another Copy: Opens another copy of the file.
- Change to Open File: Changes to the already open version of the file.
- Ask User: Ask the user what to do (default).
File Save Options
- Save Backup: Generates a backup version of the file when it is saved.
The Clipboard Options section allows you to choose the clipboard import and export formats. The default Import format is Auto-Detect. The default Export format is Shift-JIS.
Related Topics
Miscellaneous Options
The Misc options page contains a number of options that don't fit anywhere else. These options are:
Character Information
- Show Titles: If selected (the default) titles are shown in the list box of the Character Information dialog box.
- Compressed: Selecting this options displays the reading fields (meaning, on-yomi, kun-yomi, and nanori) in a compressed format, where entries are separated by commas, instead of on separate lines. This allows much more information to be viewed, at the expense of readability.
- Single Dialog: Causes JWPce to use only a single dialog for Character Information instead of opening a new dialog box for each character.
- Setup: Launches the Configure Character Information dialog and allows configuring the order of information presented in the Character Information dialog.
Insert Into File
- Insert on new Lines: If selected (default), causes text inserted from a Japanese list box to be inserted into separate lines (actually paragraphs) for each entry inserted.
The following options pertain to the Color Kanji feature:
- Use Color Kanji: Clearing this checkbox will completely disable the Color Kanji feature (enabled by default).*
- Color Kanji in List: If this is selected the kanji in the list will be colored and the kanji not in the list will be black.
- Color kanji Not in List: If this is selected the kanji in the list will be black and the kanji not in the list will be colored (default).
- Select Kanji Color (or click in the color box): Allows you to choose the color used by the Color Kanji feature (blue by default).
- Clipboard BITMAP: If this is checked, JWPce will export color data to the clipboard BITMAP format, if cleared JWPce will export only black & white data.
- Printing: If this is checked, Color Kanji will be printed in color. If it is cleared, printing will be black & white.
Related Topics
* If you are using a very slow machine, disabling color kanji can increase the screen update speed a little.
Advanced Options
WARNING! Most of the settings on the Advanced options page are technical in nature. If you are unsure of what they do, you may not want to change them. Also remember that you can restore the default configuration by using the menu command Utilities/Default Options, but this will reset EVERYTHING!The Advanced options page contains a number of technical options that can be adjusted to suit your individual tastes.
WARNING! Allocation Size is very technical!
- Allocation Size: JWPce allocates space for storing your text on a paragraph basis. The Allocation Size is the storage increment that JWPce uses.(This number is the number of words per increment, a word being two bytes.). Making this number too large leads to lots of wasted memory, particularly if your text has many short paragraphs.* If this value is too small, JWPce has to make too allocation requests and could fragment the memory badly. The default value is 40.
- Conv Choices: JWPce remembers the kanji you choose from the kana->kanji conversions,so it can present the same choice to you the next time you do the same conversion. Conv Choices is the number of kana->kanji conversions that are remembered.** Making this number larger allows storing more conversion choices, at the expense of using more disk and memory space for the file (8 bytes per entry). If it is too big, manipulating the list will slow the conversion process. The default is 200.
- Undo Levels: Determines the maximum number of undo steps retained per file. Increasing this number requires more memory. The default is 50 per file!
- Font Cache: To reduce memory usage, JWPce does not load all the kanji fonts into memory at one time. The characters are loaded as they are used and saved in a cache, so that common characters do not need to be reloaded. This parameter determines the number of kanji in the cache. Making the cache too large both wastes memory and slows down general rendering, because the cache search takes longer. Making the cache too small slows things down and exercises your hard drive more than you may want. The default is 400. (Font caching does not affect TrueType fonts.)
- History Cache: Buffer size allocated for the history cache. The actual size in bytes is twice this. The default is 300 (or 600 bytes). Basically a rule of thumb is this will hold 1/10 the size in terms of lines, or 30 entries for the default. One buffer this size is allocated for every history.
- Keep Search Dialogs Open: Causes the Search and Replace dialogs to remain open on the screen. This is the default. Previous behavior was to close these dialog boxes.
- Dictionary Buffer Size: Indicates the size in bytes used for accessing buffered dictionaries. The minimum size for this buffer is 2048 bytes, but the maximum size is unlimited. Increasing the size makes buffered dictionary searches slightly faster at the expense of additional resources.
- Cache Display Font: Normally JWPce does not cache the display font, because it usually is the 16x16 bitmapped font, which can be stored in only 220KB. On the other hand, the 48x48 bitmapped printer font requires 2.3MB. If this checkbox is selected, JWPce will cache the display font. You may want to consider this option if you are using a large font for display. (Font caching does not effect TrueType fonts.)
- Cache Kanji Information:With the exception of the Radical Lookup, all of the kanji lookups make a great number of accesses to the kanjinfo.dat file. The speed of these searches can be greatly increased by caching the kanjinfo.dat file in memory, at the expense of using up 500 kB of memory. The kanjinfo.dat file can be moved into memory by using this checkbox. For people who have lots of memory, slow machines, and/or use the lookup features a lot, caching kanjinfo.dat is advised.
Code page Options
The code page determines the code page used for translating between UNICODE and non-UNICODE encoding systems. Future versions of JWPce will probably use UNICODE encoding internally, and then convert to whatever encoding the user has requested. The current versions JWPce, however, use an extended form of JIS encoding internally. This requires correctly interpreting the code page used by the system. By default, this option is set to Auto, which causes JWPce to use the code page matching the local set on your computer. The problem is that there can be several reasons why one would want to change the code page used by the program to another code page. The most dominant is that you may want your computer’s local set to Japan so the IME works correctly, or because you run other Japanese software. This can cause JWPce to interpret all extended ASCII characters as being on the Western Europe/USA code page (1252).
Note that JWPce currently only supports code pages that are essentially mapping of the extended ASCII character set (128-255). More complicated language supports such as Korean, or Chinese are not supported at this time.
Also remember that JWPce can display and process Japanese text regardless of what the code page option, non-UNICODE language, or computer local are set to.
The interactions of the code page settings can be very complicated and can be best illustrated by assuming you are want to use the Cyrillic code page as your native code page. Depending on the operating system you are using there are a number of different ways to do this:
Windows XP
The following methods will correctly support Cyrillic text in JWPce:
- Leave the code page setting on Auto, and set the computer to use Cyrillic for non-Unicode programs. Requires a specific Cyrillic font (such as Arial Cry).
- Leave the code page setting on Auto, and use an AppLocal utility to set the local for JWPce to a location that uses Cyrillic text. Requires a UNICODE font.
- Set the code page to 1251 – Cyrillic on the Advanced Options page. In this case it does not really mater what you set the non-UNICODE program language to. JWPce will interpret extended ASCII codes as Cyrillic. This requires a specific Cyrillic font.
Windows CE
The following methods will correctly support Cyrillic text in Windows CE version of JWPce:
- It does not really mater where you set the local on Windows CE. All Windows CE programs are UNICODE programs, and the text is not normally translated using the code page. In this case you should set the JWPce Code Page option to 1251 – Cyrillic, and use any UNICODE font (most Windows CE fonts are full UNICODE fonts).
Related Topics
- Undo and Redo
- Explicit Kanji Conversion
- Inline Kanji Conversion
- User Kana to Kanji Conversions
- Fonts
* Wasted space (assuming uniform distribution) is Allocation Size*number_of_paragraphs.** More conversions are actually remembered. To store as many conversions as possible JWPce only stores those where you do not take the default choice (first kanji on the list) or retain the kana. To further reduce the list and make it a fixed-size for fast scanning, JWPce only stores conversions of no more than six kana. Generally if the conversion has more than six kana, there is only one or two choices.
Toolbar Customization
Windows CE versions of JWPce have a toolbar (in Windows CE language called a command bar), but it cannot be disabled or configured. The PPC versions JWPce have a horizontal scrolling command bar that toggles between showing the menu and the most common buttons.
Next Chapter: Fonts