Inputing Chinese Characters

The Yale site you mentioned has excellent instructions:

http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac/pages/tcim_x3.html

I chose pinyin within "traditional chinese" as my input method but my characters are coming out "simplified"...do you have any idea why? Could I be using the wrong font? What is the correct font for Traditional characters?

Thank you (xie4xie.)

Yes, the brush/ben is the icon that shows up in the menu bar.

I'm using Text Edit as the application. (Tried Eudora but it wasn't working consistently).

TextEdit doesn't list any of the fonts you mentioned as common Traditional Chinese (Taipei, LiGothic, LiHei Pro, BiauKai). Instead, it uses "Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro" for my input which makes me wonder if I have the right fonts installed.

How do I check what fonts are installed on my system?

I looked in <system disk>/Library/Fonts/ as well as ~/Library/Fonts/ and don't see any of the fonts that you mentioned.

Where should the Traditional Chinese fonts be installed?

Can I install the needed fonts from my Panther install CD? (Sorry for asking such a basic question.)

Thanks again for your help.

Most likely I removed these fonts when I did the install...it was before I started learning Chinese so I didn't think I'd need them! 😟

I installed the following packages from Panther disk 2:

- AdditionalAsianFonts.pkg
- TraditionalChinese.pkg

And, just for good measure, I re-booted.

Now I see:

- BiauKai
- LiHei Pro

I still don't see Taipei or LiGothic...are they in another package?

So, now when I select BiauKai as my TextEdit font I see Traditional Chinese characters...great!

And, once I changed the font preference for the input mode to BiauKai then I also see Traditional Chinese characters in the input palette.

All is right with the world.

All that remains is to install Taipei and LiGothic...any ideas?

Thanks again.

- nello

I also want to type Pinyin. How do I get the tone mark to appear above the Roman characters?

I know that I can use the Character Palette, setting the View to "Roman" and selecting "Accented Latin" and then hunting for the combination of the character and tone mark.

Surely, there is a better way to add a tone mark to the Roman characters as I type them.

Thank you for your chart of diacritical marks.

Tone/Keystroke
1 (¯)/Option-a
2 (´)/Option-e
3 (?)/Option-v
4 (`)/Option-`
Neutral (?)/Option-w

I installed Word 2004 and am able to write traditional Chinese and US Extended characters in the same document.

Just one problem...what fonts are Unicode (US Extended)?

I tried using Baskerville for my roman characters. Seems to work fine except when I use neutral tone (option-w) above any character. When I do this the font changes to Monaco just for that character.

Any ideas why Word 2004 changes the font to Monaco? After the keystrokes, I selected the character and tried to change the font to Baskerville, but the font won't change!

So, I tried an experiment with TextEdit (ver.1.3). I set the font to Baskerville and typed an "a" with each of the four tone marks as well as the neutral tone mark. In TextEdit, both the third (option-v) and neutral (option-w) tones switch to Lucida Grande and I can't change the characters to Baskerville here either.

So, both applications flip characters marked with certain tones to mono spaced fonts. Any idea why?

What fonts can I use for Pinyin?

Thanks again for your help.

- nello

I have three keyboard layouts, namely, traditional Chinese, US, and US Extended.

I'm going crazy typing a table of definitions in Word 2004 that includes separate columns for: Chinese Characters (using Traditional Chinese keyboard layout), Pinyin (US Extended), and definitions (US). Each time I complete a row, a new row is created and the keyboard input method changes to US.

I know that there is a keyboard short cut for flipping between layouts but with three layouts it is very tedious.

If I could reduce the number of layouts to two, then I could use the short cut (cmd-spacebar) that toggles between them.

I don't see why I need US since US Extended includes all the roman characters. However, the checkbox for US in <System Preferences/International: Input Method> is grayed out do I don't see a way to delete it form the list of keyboard layouts on my menu bar.

Is there any way to toggle between two of three keyboard layout? Or, is there anyway to delete US? Or is there any way to get Word 2004 to stop dumping me into US whenever it sees?

Thanks.

- nello

Apparently, some Pinyin words use multiple diacritical marks...how do I get multiple diacritical marks to appear over a character?

For example, a Pinyin for the word green is: lu with BOTH the diacritical marks umlaut (option-u) and tone four (option-`).

I found this character in the Character Palette in the Unicode view and was able to use the "insert" button to place it in my document. Surely, there is an easier way that just involves keystrokes.

How do I create the character "u" with BOTH an umlaut (¨) and tone 4 (`) mark above it without using the Character Palette>

Thanks to the replies in this thread, I've input hundreds of Chinese characters.

But, there is one I can't find using my Pinyin keyboard setup.

I can't find the first character for the word can(1)jia(1) ("c?nji?") which my book says means, "to attend, to participate." I find the character for ji? just fine. And there are lots of characters for c?n but not the one that my book has.

Are some characters missing from OSX's Pinyin lookup? Am I just overlooking it? Is my book wrong?

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

- nello