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The Duke Chinese Typist had its own fixed-width 16-bit character codes, in order to deal with both traditional complex and simple-style Chinese characters without redundant codes in its own version of "Han unification," as well as English, pinyin with tone marks, and other symbols such as bopomofo phonetic characters. When its user interface and text handling routines were adapted to WinCALIS, the system for handling characters and fonts was explicitly designed so that it could be generalized into a fixed-width 16-bit coding system for all characters in all languages.
It was our good fortune that this was about the time that the Unicode Consortium published the Unicode Standard 1.0. We had been monitoring the progress of Unicode through several pre-release editions. Development of a thoroughly Unicode-compliant WinCALIS 16-bit editor (to which we will return later) began in November of 1992. We were able to convert almost all of our old ad hoc single-byte codes directly to Unicode. Because there was a shakedown period for Unicode Han code points, our initial 16-bit codes for Chinese were Unicode-compatible (in the sense that they occupied the code zone 4000h-9FFFh), rather than strictly Unicode. But since 1993 our Chinese-Japanese-Korean codes are all fully Unicode, with a small percentage of private-use character codes, which are further discussed below.
While using a Windows graphical-user interface which encourages the use of point-and-click with the mouse, WinCALIS continues the emphasis established by DOS CALIS on actual language production. Thanks to internal support for Unicode, coupled with user-friendly "front-ends" of our own design for all languages which WinCALIS handles, WinCALIS can be used to teach any language to speakers of any language. I know of no other computer-assisted instruction environment in Windows in which it is possible for Japanese to learn Arabic, or Russians to learn Korean. Even word processors which handle these various languages seamlessly are very rare.
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