Traditional Chinese IME crashes on certain syllables

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Level 1

6 points

Traditional Chinese IME crashes on certain syllables

Hello,

I'm frequently using the Traditional Chinese IME on OS X, but recently it became a pain in the neck because it constantly crashes when I enter certain syllables. It doesn't matter whether I use pinyin or zhuyin, whenever I type a, yi or zhi, my Mac freezes for a few seconds and then the IME doesn't react anymore. I can type on but there's no conversion. I have to start it again to type on, which is extremely annoying. And I still can't type those syllables, because when I try it crashes again.

I don't know how long I'm encountering this problem now, but it's very annoying when chatting with my Taiwanese friends because there now are certain characters I just can't type.

Does anyone know what causes this and how I can fix it?

Thank you very much in advance for your help.

MacBook Pro 13", Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Jul 8, 2010 2:47 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,940 points

Jul 8, 2010 3:15 AM in response to Alex Liu

If you do not get an answer here, you might ask in the Chinese Mac group:

http://groups.google.com/group/chinesemac

Another report of something similar:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11706594&#11706594

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Answer 2

Alex Liu Author

Level 1

6 points

Jul 13, 2010 12:48 AM in response to Alex Liu

Excuse me for bumping my thread, but I really need some help. Not being able to properly type Chinese is a big problem for me. 😟

I've asked in the Chinese Mac Group, but I didn't get any replies there either, so I'm hoping that someone has at least a slight idea what may cause this. If nothing helps, I guess I have to reinstall my whole operating system, but I want to avoid that if possible, because I quite frankly don't have the time for this at the moment.

Reading about some problems people had with the Japanese IME, I found out that a similar problem to this with Kotoeri can be solved by deleting a certain config file assigned to Kotoeri in the user library … maybe there's a similar solution for the Chinese IME? I didn't find any config files, though, and I searched my whole user library. Does anyone know, where the Chinese IME's config data is kept?

Thank you.

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Answer 3

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,940 points

Jul 13, 2010 3:04 AM in response to Alex Liu

If you create a new user account, does the problem persist when you are logged into that? If so, it indicates a system level problem rather than user level.

But if no one at Chinese Mac has any specific advice, then a reinstall is probably the way to go.

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Answer 4

Alex Liu Author

Level 1

6 points

Jul 13, 2010 4:33 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

****, I should have tried that before. It's so obvious, but I didn't think of it.

And no, the problem does for whatever reason not occur on different user accounts, so it's most certainly a problem with my account's config files for the IME. Now I just have to find them.

Thanks!

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Answer 5

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,940 points

Jul 13, 2010 4:35 AM in response to Alex Liu

One thing you could try is cleaning caches. One of the apps that does this is Onyx.

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Answer 6

Alex Liu Author

Level 1

6 points

Jul 13, 2010 4:55 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

No, that didn't help. Thanks for the app, though, it's a really great tool.

I feel the conversion going smoother now, but the crashes on those syllables still occur. Maybe I can somehow create a new user account and transfer my stuff over … that'd at least be less a pain in the neck than completely reinstalling Snow Leopard.

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Answer 7

Alex Liu Author

Level 1

6 points

Jul 13, 2010 5:16 AM in response to Alex Liu

Okay, I found the solution. So for everyone who encounters the same problem, here's what I did:

I used Spotlight on my user library to find items with TCIM (which is the identifier for Traditional Chinese Input Method) in it, and there was a load of crash reports. I read those reports and found that it crashed on the com.apple.main-thread preference file. So I deleted it, logged out and back in, and not everything works just fine.
That's really some obscure error, but at least I can type Chinese again. 🙂

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Answer 8

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,940 points

Jul 13, 2010 5:33 AM in response to Alex Liu

I read those reports and found that it crashed on the com.apple.main-thread preference file. So I deleted it, logged out and back in, and not everything works just fine.

That's a new one -- thanks much for the feedback!

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