Magic Trackpad Does Chinese Handwriting Input

Although Apple totally fails to mention it, the new Magic Trackpad will do Chinese Handwriting input just like the multitouch trackpad of certain Apple laptops. The July 29 report here may be of use to people who want to try it.

Update 8/13/2010: Apple has now documented this feature here.

As with the laptop feature, Japanese is not supported.

OS X Support for Ideographic Variation Sequences

In an earlier article I noted that Unicode 5.1 added codepoints for Ideographic Variation Sequences (IVS), which can be used to trigger display of glyph variants in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

OS X 10.6 has support for IVS in TextEdit, as described in this recent blog article. All you need is one of the Adobe Pr6N Japanese fonts.

Inputting an IVS is not so simple, however, because Character Viewer won't scroll down to U+E0100 and the Unicode Hex keyboard requires typing in two surrogates. The easiest way is to have UnicodeChecker on your machine. Then you can copy/paste from that or type in the character entity (like 󠄀 ) and convert it via the html > unicode item in the Services menu.

PS I see now an easier way. You can put the IVS characters in the Kotoeri dictionary and invoke them via vs0, vs1, etc. directly from the Kotoeri IM. Here is a demo page I did using that method.

iPhone/iPod Touch: Useful Language Apps

A key feature of the iPhone/iPod Touch is the ability to draw Chinese and Japanese characters on its screen. I don't know how useful this is for creating text, but it is an invaluable replacement for radical/stroke analysis when looking up these characters in a dictionary. For Japanese I am using the app Kotoba and for Chinese DianHua.

Other language apps I've found so far that seem especially useful or high quality are the mobile version of Google Translate, the Larousse Dictionnaire de Français, the Classic Greek dictionary Lexiphanes, and the Latin dictionary Lexidium.

Additional suggestions by readers are most welcome.

OS X 10.6: Changing Default Font for Trad. Chinese

Apparently a number of Traditional Chinese users find the new font used by Snow Leopard by default for that language (HeiTi TC) to be inferior to that used in Leopard (LiHei Pro). A utility called TCFail has been created to change it back. See this page for info:

http://zonble.github.com/tcfail/en.html

New CJKV Reference Book

Those interested in some of the nitty-gritty for doing Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese on the computer will want to check out the newly-published 2nd edition of CJKV Information Processing by Ken Lunde, Adobe's senior expert on this topic.

I got a copy and think it is a very valuable reference, with tons of stuff that is hard or impossible to find elsewhere. The chapters on input methods, typography, and gaiji were especially useful to fill gaps in my own understanding.

Bug in iPhone/iPod Chinese Handwriting Input

The Chinese handwriting input on the latest iPhone/iPod Touch is a pretty impressive feature. But when using the Simplified Chinese version of this, you may find that only 4 character choices are given, so that if none is correct you have to start over. If you switch to the Traditional Chinese version, you will find a button over at the left which says 其他. Tapping this will give you additional sets of 4 choices, where you will probably find the correct one.

The lack of the 其他 button for Simplified Chinese is presumably a bug which Apple will need to fix.