Typing pinyin with tone marks in OSX

[imron]

I've recently bought a Macbook Pro, and have been playing around with a few things, one of which is the feature which allows you to create user defined Input Methods.

Attached is a zip file containing a text file I created which creates an input method for typing pinyin with tone marks. Just unzip it, and then see here for instructions on how to generate the input method. You may need to restart OSX before you can use it.

It's not as nice as a fully-fledged input method, but it will do in a pinch, and is far more convenient than firing up a webpage. Now I have a Mac, i'll probably get around to porting Pinyinput to OSX once I find some time.

A couple of things to note:

*You can only type one syllable at a time - this appears to be limitation of the automatically generated input methods.

*Type space to finish the syllable. If you type return, the syllable disappears. I'm sure there's probably a setting that will change this, but the documentation for auto-generated input methods is rather sparse.

*Neutral tones are typed using 5 rather than 0 or just no number. This is so that when the selection box comes up, the numbers will correspond to the correct tones (otherwise, the neutral tone was coming up as number 1). Other tones are typed using their respective numbers.

pinyin.zip

[[欧阳江]]

I usually do like this.

[imron]

Yeah, the problem I found with that though is:

1) I don't want to remember arbitrary key combinations. Typing pin1yin1 seems so much more natural than pinyin.

2) I don't normally have US extended as one of the available keyboard layouts, and if I'm going to add a new layout just to type pinyin, then I'd rather have one specifically for pinyin, rather than an arbitrary layout.

3) I don't want to have to think about which vowel takes the tone mark. Using a custom Input Method means the tone mark is put in the correct place automatically.

[muyongshi]

from this thread

For all the mac users out there...

There is a great (free) pinyin with tone marks input method called biaoyin. It can be found at http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac/pages/romanization.html

Hope this is useful as well!

From the way you describe it this one seems a lot like the one you have been using Imron. Download the file and then using the ITABC standard input you generate an IM plug-in and restart. No funny combinations to remember just pin1yin1 and there you go. Gives the option of capitalization as well. Can only do one word at a time and no other special gimmicks. The vowel placement is automatic as well.