New Cantonese Input Method Software

[Shusaku]

CantoInput is a freely available, Unicode-based Chinese input method (IME) which allows you to type both traditional and simplified characters using Cantonese romanization. Both the Yale and Jyutping methods are supported. A Mandarin Pinyin mode is also available.

While there already exist excellent phonetic input methods based on Mandarin Pinyin pronunciation, there is a general lack of support for Cantonese. As a Cantonese learner, I was frustrated by the difficulty of typing Chinese, especially Cantonese-specific colloquial characters. Most existing Cantonese input methods require a Chinese version of Windows and operate using non-Unicode encodings such as BIG5 or GB, while non-phonetic methods such as Cangjie have a very steep learning curve. I originally wrote this program for my own personal use but decided to make it freely available since I felt that other Cantonese speakers and learners might also find it useful. It's still really basic at this time, but hopefully I'll have time to improve the interface and add more features in the future.

http://cantoinput.wordpress.com/

Edited February 28, 2009 at 10:08 PM by Shusaku

[Chongtak]

Hello I've been waiting for cantonese IME for sooo long!

I've just downloaded it but I don't find any executable file inside the archive. Did I skip something? I have Java last version istalled on my system (XP) and many chinese fonts as well. Could you give me a hint on the way to use it?

Thank you in advance.

PS : excuse my english I'm living in France and not confortable with english sometimes.

[self-taught-mba]

Wow. This is huge news! if it works well it could completely undermine the arguement against Cantonese due to computer compatibility issues. Black helicopters (with red stars) will be hovering outside your home.

Hope my Cantonese gets to where I can actually try it. I am a newbie.

[Quest]

It downloads as .zip in IE. I changed it to .jar and it still wouldn't run... I must of deleted my java libraries. This looks interesting, can you make it a windows executable? (edit: I downloaded the JRE libraries, now it works.)

It's a neat little program, you've done a great job! Suggestions to follow though, if possible, that in addition to the standard romanization methods, you give an option to let the user define their own spellings, which can be mapped to the standard spellings, sort of like a "custom method" that can be built by the user by changing the spellings in a standard pronunciation table (table can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyutping). A user like me, who's totally unfamiliar with the "standard" Cantonese spellings can bring up the table and edit the fields/spellings for each sound to match his own "intuition". For example, I would think the standard Jyutping for 水 "seoi" is too long and less intuitive to me, and would like to replace it with "sui", so next time I type "sui" the software will bring up all the words previously associated with "seoi". To prevent users from setting same spellings for different sounds, you could add a uniqueness check before letting the user save his pronunciation table. Something like an "input-jyutping.utf-8" editor, in a tabular format that can be brought up within the program. Also, it would be great if this could be made an IME. It looks promising, keep up the great work!

[atitarev]

Great tool, Shusaku! I've been looking for it for some time. I also replied to you in the Cantonese forum.

Is it possible to add characters and have the characters in a file separate fromthe package file? For example, a Cantonese specific character (defined in Hong Kong Cantonese specific character set), which can't be displayed in some browsers (but can be used in a MS Word document, if you have the Hong Kong character set installed) for "lift", pronounced lip1 (Unicode:U+4882), which looks like 車 + 立 (together). There are plenty of others.

Is your code an open source? Do you mind sharing the code with me, please.

I recently wrote a simple one way Hangul conversion tool in C#.Net - it romanises a Korean text, written in Korean. It only works one way for the moment because of the issues of converting double consonants and diphtongs, need for character delimiter, etc.

Can offer you this if interested in return.

EDIT:

Attached the file with the "lift" character, if the file is not displayed correctly, you need to download support for Cantonese.

Lift character (Cantonese specific).doc

[roddy]

Geocities in blocked from China, and has been for years. If you are hoping to get any significant user base in China, you might want to set up a mirror elsewhere.

[RedMoon]

Have you thought about porting it to a "native" windows application? That way you could install a system-wide keyboard hook which means it would be compatible with all windows programs. In other words, keystrokes are first sent to your application, you do all your processing there, then send the modified result (the Cantonese character) to the target window.

I've tried your tool out, and it's quite good (even though I know next-to-nothing). Great job - keep it up!

[xiaojiang216]

I used this software frequently not too long ago. But now that I have started using it again, I cannot get certain characters to display. (For example: o的 appears as a big box, as well as o係, etc.)

Is there something that I'm being stupid about?

[uccoffee]

who to type these words?

去

衫

村

the code site is down at the moment

[wannabeafreak]

The best Cantonese IME is http://www.cantonese.org.cn/Soft/2006/200605/Soft_20060513104337.html

Traditional, Jyutping, and has all the special Canto Characters. However, need to set your locale to PRC.