punct

Some input methods have versions with or without -punct (see the table above). The -punct versions support proper Chinese punctuation characters. However, (a) although chinese-punct works, chinese-py-punct (& poss. others) doesn’t seem to; (b) versions without -punct use ascii punctuation, which meets my needs for the moment.

In the discussion below I ignore the -punct versions.

b5

Some input methods have versions with or without -b5. The -b5 input methods generate characters in the Big Five character set. Big Five is a Taiwanese character set for traditional characters. Other input methods support GB2312, which is a character set from the People’s Republic of China, for simplified characters. For example:

For the full skinny on character sets see Lunde (1999).

I presume that, apart from chinese-b5-quick and chinese-b5-tsangchi, the -b5 input methods work the same way as the non-b5 methods, but just output Big Five (i.e., traditional script) instead of GB2312 (i.e., simplified script). Consequently, in the following discussion I ignore the -b5 versions (apart from chinese-b5-quick and chinese-b5-tsangchi).

chinese-4corner

No description in description!

The Wikipedia provides a description [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_corner_method]. You use four digits to describe the four corners of a character (top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right).

Quoting the Wikipedia article:

Usage example:

To be honest, I cheated here: the Wiktionary gives four corner codes for Chinese characters (e.g., http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/好).

chinese-array30

Outputs Big Five.

Some docs:

• http://www.array.com.tw/ (in Chinese)
• http://openvanilla.org/ (partly in Chinese)
• scim-array: Array 30 Input Method Engine for SCIM (in English).

Seems to be quite popular, and the MS Windows Chinese input method seems to use it. However, I can’t make head or tail of it. Also, it outputs Big Five.

chinese-b5-tsangchi

This is a Taiwanese method based on geometrical decomposition of characters. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_method.

Again, I got these from the Wiktionary, but I can understand how they were made up. Notice that ‘ma’ is the traditional 嗎 and not the simplified 吗.

chinese-b5-quick

This looks like it should be a ‘quick’ version of b5-tsangchi. Indeed it takes fewer keystrokes to get to an end character - but I can’t find the end character I want. In other words, I don’t know how it uses the Tsangchi system.

chinese-ccdospy

From the description:

This input method works almost the same way as chinese-py_.  The
difference is that you type a single key for these Pinyin spelling.
    Pinyin:  zh  en  eng ang ch  an  ao  ai  ong sh  ing  yu(ü)
    keyseq:   a   f   g   h   i   j   k   l   s   u   y   v

chinese-cns-tsangchi

Probably the same as chinese-b5-tsangchi, but outputing a CNS (Chinese National Standards) character set instead of Big Five (possibly CNS 11643-1992). My Emacs hasn’t got the fonts for it.

chinese-cns-quick

See chinese-cns-tsangchi and chinese-b5-quick.

chinese-ctlau

An input method based on Sidney Lau’s Romanisation system. (a) it’s for Cantonese; (b) it generates Big5; (c) I can’t get it to work.

chinese-ctlaub

See chinese-ctlau.

chinese-ecdict

Pretty impressive. You type in the English word and the Chinese (Big5) word appears! Wow!

Impressive but:

• notice that ‘good’ doesn’t actually give us hao3 (好), it gives us liang2 hao3 de (良好的). 良好 still means ‘good’ but 的 is a connector making this adjective ready to add on to a noun.
• I don’t know how I would get a grammatical particle like 吗 (ma).
• This will be handy for emergencies but I think I’ll keep a dictionary around too.

chinese-etzy

A Zhuyin input method with Big5 output.

chinese-py

Type in pinyin, without tones.

chinese-qj

Possibly another Zhuyin input method. The description has virtually no information.

chinese-sisheng

This will be quite useful. This input method does not generate Hanzi, but it transforms pinyin with tone numbers into ‘proper’ pinyin with diacritics.

chinese-sw

Type in a pair of radicals. Quite clever and fast (and not pronunciation-based), easy to pick up. Usefulness will depend on coverage.

chinese-tonepy

Type in pinyin, with tones.

n.b.: chinese-py-b5 is the same as this method, but outputs Big Five i.e., traditional characters. A useful alternative to chinese-tonepy for when I want to write Trad.

chinese-ziranma

A pinyin-based input method where the pinyin initials and finals are mapped onto the qwerty keyboard (see http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/unicode/KeyboardLayouts/ZiRanMaPinYinKeyboard.html).

The basic idea is a four-stroke pattern: initial, final, tone, quote (’). This may not be that impressive for, say, 好 (hke’), but the pattern extends to cover words, not just characters. That means that two-, three- or four- character words can be input with the same four-stroke pattern. The example from the description is 北京电视台 (bjdt) (Běijīng diànshìtái; Beijing TV station), which is impressive for four keystrokes.

chinese-zozy

A Big5 Zhuyin input method.