Quick Question - Chinese and Keyboards

[sca_sethe]

What's a good program for inserting Chinese characters through a regular keyboard - using the phoentics that convert into the Chinese script? My friend has been searching for one for over a year now, otherwise I wouldn't have asked without searching first.

Hopefully, this will help out someone else, too, who has a similar question? =3

Thankies!

Comments

[frances_bea]

For Windows users, there's also a Google program some people like which is free for download here: http://www.google.com/ime/pinyin/

I haven't tried it, but I know a lot of people swear by it over Microsoft's bundled tools.

[flamingspinach]

Unfortunately, while you can hack the registry to get Microsoft's IME to accept Dvorak input, I still haven't found a way to do so for Google Pinyin...

[frances_bea]

Egad! Another Dvorak user on the loose!

Seriously, that is a good point, and just goes to show that Google doesn't do everything better than Microsoft. I'm surprised that the hardware solution seems to have faded from popularity. If the keyboard is wired to send the correct signals to the computer then the computer doesn't even have to know where your keys are.

Looking around, it looks like the hardware solutions on the market are few, and pricey. This little adapter seems like a cute solution - for desktop computers, at least:
http://www.keyghost.com/qido/

[flamingspinach]

Nah, hardware isn't the way, IMO. A lot of programs accept keyboard input in a way that is dependent on the physical locations of the keys - for example, a lot of games use wasd, vim uses hjkl, etc., and often they read the scan codes directly and don't let you remap. Moving the Dvorak conversion into hardware doesn't allow you to take advantage of such functionality

[frances_bea]

Ugh. This sort of stuff reminds me why I'm just not willing to make the switch. How many hours do you think you spend in any given month working on keyboard compatibility issues?

That adapter I linked to is supposed to allow you to switch keyboard configurations by double-tapping the numlock key. That seems to answer most of the problems by allowing you to drop into qwerty when you have a qwerty-dependent application. That doesn't stop it from being way too expensive for what it is.

[flamingspinach]

I don't really think about it much. I mostly carry my laptop around with me in my backpack, and use it to do whatever needs to be done on a computer, and whenever I'm absolutely forced to use other computers it's usually a simple matter to get dvorak up and running (maybe 5 minutes max?) I also carry around on my USB drive this useful program, which simplifies matters usually. But really, it's not something I have to think about very much. It is amusing when other people try to use my computer, though :) I still have QWERTY installed, but I've customized the switching shortcuts too, so people get pretty confused -- not to mention that it's usually in Japanese mode...