[X4U] Chinese on an iBook. Any advice?

[John Bryan]

Hi, Phillip,


>
> They are now considering ditching the Mac and moving to Windows  
> instead. I
> can't believe that Macs are no good in the most populous country in  
> the
> world and I would love to help.
>
> Maybe they need to buy a software package?

ACK!  No!!    ;-)    Absolutely not necessary.

We do this all the time, my wife more than me, (from Changsha, then  
Beijing).  It is quite easy and there are a variety of built-in input  
methods.

You can go to the System Preferences and select the International and  
you can pick whatever additional languages you want.  Someplace or  
another you can even set it so the whole OS is in that language, to  
the degree possible, but I haven't done that in a while.

Anyway, go to the International preference panel, click on the "Edit  
List..." button and just click/check select the other languages.   
Since Beijing I am assuming Simplified Chinese but I would include  
Traditional Chinese as well for some sites, characters, etc.  The  
names in the listing are actually in Chinese, but they should be able  
to figure it given that they have settled down in Beijing.  ;-)

After closing out of this preference, you can then go to the upper  
right of the menu bar and there will probably be a little US flag  
there, depending on how you ordered things in the International  
preference.  Click on that and a drop down menu will show will all  
the various Chinese input methods.  There are pinyin, and others I am  
not familiar with.  It is pretty cool.  You type the pinyin for the  
character, say 'hao', hit the space bar, then a selection of possible  
characers appears, and you select which one.  They are in order of  
number of strokes, and if you wait a bit, it will enlarge the  
character it is on so you can see it better.

You don't need to buy any software package at all.  It has been a  
built in option in the OS for years now, maybe as much as 10.  I  
bought the Chinese language kit, just before they EOL'ed it, (I  
didn't know), and later it was all built into the OS.  (Sometimes as  
an install option)

Of course the application that you are entering your characters into  
needs to be able to take them.  Safari, Chinese Yahoo and Google,  
TextEdit, Word,  Mail, everything we use for input seems to work just  
fine.

When sending mail you might need to check and set the format encoding  
to be GB2312 or whatever.

BTW, this is on OS X, but it was true for OS 9.x as well.

If they have any problems or questions, they can mail me offline.    
There is also an email group called Chinese Mac which is for Chinese  
language stuff on Macs,

Here's some links for it and another useful Chinese-on-Mac site :

For excellent information on using Chinese on your Mac, go to this  
website: http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac/

Yahoo! Groups Link    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/chinese-mac/


John Bryan   安哲翰


On Jan 19, 2006, at 7:30 AM, Phillip Deackes wrote:

> I have a friend who has moved to Beijing. She has an iBook, and has  
> now
> settled down with a Chinese boyfriend. Unfortunately, he cannot  
> easily input
> Chinese characters on the Mac - a task he finds easy on a Windows  
> computer.
>
> They are now considering ditching the Mac and moving to Windows  
> instead. I
> can't believe that Macs are no good in the most populous country in  
> the
> world and I would love to help.
>
> Maybe they need to buy a software package?
>
> Any advice would be gratefully received.
>
> -- 
> Phillip Deackes
> UK
>
>
>
>
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