Simple example: "fat" in Chinese is "胖“, which is U+ in Unicode. It's approximately pronounced "pahng" in Mandarin. So I enable the ITABC system, type "pang", press the space bar and several glyphs show up in a little box near the cursor. Then I just select the one I want. ITABC can do more than that, but that's the basic idea.
I like ITABC since I can just type in what I hear, using the Latin keyboard. Some people find that they can type more quickly using other IMEs - the WuBi method for example, which is based on the strokes in a Chinese glyph, is supposed to be very fast.
There are similar IMEs in WIndows XP - I'd bet Linux has them, too. On Apr 24, 2006, at 9:57 PM, Brian Blakeley wrote:
I saw your blog a little while ago Sean and thought things were lookinggo for you. Thanks for the confirmation! How did you enter the Chinese characters? Using the software you mentioned or cut and paste? Would be glad to have you take up residence at cheblogs.com if that meets your needs. Brian On Mon, 2006-04-24 at 21:19 -0400, Sean Montgomery wrote:I just created a blog and posted a quick entry on your site, Brian. I entered Chinese characters in the blog title, blog subtitle, blog entry title and the blog entry proper. Everything showed up exactly as I typed it, no question marks: http://www.cheblogs.com/roller/page/pangmao The RSS feed looked fine and validated successfully at http:// feedvalidator.org/ and everything looked fine on the Recent Weblog Entries page. Very nice!Pity about JRoller, though. According the the JRoller blog at http://www.jroller.com/page/jroller they've got a JIRA at http:// jira.javalobby.org, but there's nothing at that URL, so I guess I won't be reporting this issue... On Apr 23, 2006, at 2:13 PM, Brian Blakeley wrote:Sorry for the delay Sean. I was out of town. The site is public and free (not for gambling,porno, or hate sites of course) - so just register for an account andyou are there! Brian On Fri, 2006-04-21 at 19:40 -0400, Sean Montgomery wrote:Hello again Brian, My apologies for the duplicate responses earlier today - my mail server hiccuped. Do you have a test login for your site that I could try? I'm beginning to wonder if my problems are due to OS X and/or Safari. I'd be curious to see what OS's and browsers people are using to enter Chinese and other glyphs that take two or more bytes to encode in UTF-8. Best wishes, Sean On Apr 21, 2006, at 5:09 AM, Brian Blakeley wrote:How about trying your blog with us over at CheBlogs.com/ I think we have the unicode features of roller tuned very well. Here is an example to consider: http://www.cheblogs.com/roller/page/xglhc Although, this seems like a plug, I am really interested in your feedback, because one of the critical goals for our site is that it be internationally friendly. Roller is a tremendous help is this goal in my view. Brian On Thu, 2006-04-20 at 23:11 -0400, Sean Montgomery wrote:Greetings, I use Safari under OS X 10.4.6 to access my Roller blog at www.jroller.com using, well, whatever version of Roller they're using today ;-) I'd like to be able to use Unicode characters in the titles of myblog entries. If I use OS X's built in Chinese input method editorto enter a Chinese character in an entry title via the Edit Entryscreen I'll see the correct character show up in the entry listing(to the right of the Edit Entry screen under Recent Entries) but all I get is a '?' when I view the blog. If I try entering an HTML entity like "胖" into the title thenI see those seven characters under Recent Entries, but I do see thecorrect single (Chinese) character when I view the blog. The correct character also shows up in the RSS feed when viewed viaSafari. The trouble comes when I try to view the new entry via thefront page of the JRoller website - it displays "胖" explicitly. Sure, I could just blame JRoller ;-) Instead I pointed feedvalidator.org at my RSS feed and validated it - they flagged the"胖" and gave a warning that the title should not containHTML and that I shouldn't be surprised if some viewers strip the characters or leave them there - like I saw at JRoller.I've seen Roller blogs that contain entries with titles containingexplicit Unicode characters - I've check out their RSS source (using Safari's View:View Source command). Their RSS feed source, like mine, contains charset="UTF-8", so that makes sense. So what am I doing wrong? It looks like there's no way for me toinput Unicode via the Chinese input method using the existing web-based Roller interface that JRoller has configured. Is it aconfiguration issue? Or do I need to use an alternative method ofposting entries that uses the Blogger or MetaWeblog APIs? I didn't find anything useful on the Roller user guides and wiki about this... Any suggestions on where to turn? 谢谢!
