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

[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.

And anyway, I'm not saying Microsoft is doing anything better than Google here. Getting Microsoft's IME to accept Dvorak is actually kind of a hack, since it was obviously not designed to work that way. It involves forcing the IME to load kbddv.dll rather than its own special expanded version of QWERTY. In the case of the Japanese IME, the registry hack actually breaks たていすかん input as well. The Google Japanese IME just seems to load the same DLL that the Microsoft Japanese IME is set to load, but Google Pinyin seems to do things differently, so I haven't figured out a way to get it to work.

As for the actual merits of the two systems, I'd say Google's prediction system is indeed superior to Microsoft's in everyday usage, both with their Japanese and their Chinese IMEs. Microsoft IME does have a couple nice features though, such as handwriting recognition, atezi disambiguation popups (really useful), and support for inputting special characters by name.

[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...