How iOS 7 with Chinese characters?

[Ant]

Hello.

Did anyone try it yet? Any issues and improvements over iOS 6 on an old iPhone 4S?

Thank you in advance. :)

[Tom Gewecke]

On Sep 18, 2013, at 4:43 PM, Ant wrote:

Did anyone try it yet? Any issues and improvements over iOS 6 on an old iPhone 4S?

I don't have it yet, but the new things I have read about that I will be checking are

+10-key pinyin input keyboard

+Chinese-English reference dictionary

+"multi-character handwriting recognition"

[Kerim Friedman]

Regarding the Chinese-English reference dictionary. I am both excited to learn about this and disappointed that it is currently only for Simplified Chinese. There is also a Chinese-Chinese dictionary (also only Simplified). Having this in Traditional Chinese would really be a major improvement, as currently I am frequently copying text to Pleco and that would no longer be necessary. 

The three apps where I would most like to have this, Instapaper, Goodreader, and Gmail, all support the built-in dictionary (although in Instapaper you may have to turn this on in the settings). When defining a word there is a "manage" button at the bottom which allows you to download from a list of various language dictionaries. Hopefully TC will be added to the list sometime soon, but I'm not holding my breath...

On the desktop it is possible to add third party dictionaries oneself (as discussed a few years ago on this list), and presumably there will be Jailbreak hacks to allow these same dictionaries to be used on iOS? If so, it would be the first time I've been tempted to jailbreak my device... 

- Kerim

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P. Kerim Friedman 傅可恩

Associate Professor

Department of Indigenous Cultures

College of Indigenous Studies

National DongHwa University, TAIWAN

副教授國立東華大學民族文化學系

[Christopher Cullen]

I am puzzled by what seems to me to be a sudden change of behaviour by IMQIM in Word:Mac 2011 version 14.3.7 on my MacBook Pro OS X 10.8, for no obvious reason.

Suppose I decide that I want the characters for the historical work by Sima Qian. I switch to IMQIM, and type 'shiji'. I then see a bar of choices, and hit the number for the characters I want, 史記. Done.

Only now if I do that in Word, instead of just getting the characters I get 'shi’ji史記', i.e. the characters with unwanted pinyin in front of them. But if I am typing to create this message (in Mac's Mail application), I just get the characters as usual. I have tried Textedit and Excel - no problem there, so it seems to be a problem with Word. I can't find anything in Word or IMQIM preferences that seems connected with such behaviour.

I've just noticed: this is only happening in one of my Word documents. All the others are normal. And if I copy the text from the anomalous document and paste it into a blank document, the behaviour does not occur with the new document. Maybe that solves the practical problem, but I'd dearly like to know what I did to start this happening, just so I can avoid doing it again!

Any ideas, please?

Christopher Cullen

[Tom Gewecke]

I've seen reports in the Apple Support Communities that the 10-key pinyin input keyboard is not available on devices outside China.  It would be really unprecedented for Apple to do something like that.  If anyone in the group installs iOS 7 I'd be interested in hearing whether they can find this keyboard and where they are.

[Kerim Friedman]

What is it called in the Keyboard selection menu? Do you have a picture?

kerim

On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 10:00 PM, Tom Gewecke <t...@bluesky.org> wrote:

I've seen reports in the Apple Support Communities that the 10-key pinyin input keyboard is not available on devices outside China.  It would be really unprecedented for Apple to do something like that.  If anyone in the group installs iOS 7 I'd be interested in hearing whether they can find this keyboard and where they are.

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[Tom Gewecke]

On Sep 19, 2013, at 10:11 AM, Kerim Friedman wrote:

What is it called in the Keyboard selection menu? Do you have a picture?

I'll see if I can find one.  But I just noticed that Apple has suddenly deleted the reference to "10-key pinyin input" that used to be on its iOS 7 info page in the section called "for china" (which actually refers to features for chinese speakers anywhere, as far as I know).

[Tom Gewecke]

On Sep 19, 2013, at 10:11 AM, Kerim Friedman wrote:

What is it called in the Keyboard selection menu? Do you have a picture?

Here is info reported earlier, with photos

http://www.best-news.us/news-5034622-Squared-basic-standard-iOS-7-Beta4-input-experience.html

[Kerim Friedman]

The options I see for Simplified Chinese are: Handwriting, Pinyin, Stroke. And for Traditional Chinese: Pinyin, Handwriting, Cangjie, Sucheng, Stroke, and Zhuyin. This is on both my iPhone and iPad running iOS in Taiwan. My system is set to English. 

kerim

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[Magnus Lewan]

Just a guess, but what are the default fonts when you type this and it works/does not work. If there is a difference there, that may be the problem.

Cheers

Magnus

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[Magnus Lewan]

Annoying. I set my iPod touch to Mainland Chinese language, mainland Chinese Region format and restarted, and I still do not see any input type contain 十.

The only difference I see between iOS 6 and 7 when it comes to input methods is that I do not have Sucheng for Traditional on iOS 6. Superficially it looks similar to Cangjie, and I do not know where they differ.

Cheers

Magnus

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[Tom Gewecke]

On Sep 19, 2013, at 11:50 AM, Magnus Lewan wrote:

Annoying. I set my iPod touch to Mainland Chinese language, mainland Chinese Region format and restarted, and I still do not see any input type contain 十

I wonder if Apple did not include it in the released version yet.  I am trying to find some who does have it....

[Christopher Cullen]

Thanks for trying!   

The default font is actually set at Times New Roman, which is one I use all the time.   The style of that particular paragraph had the Asian font set at 新細明體.

I've just tried changing both the fonts, so that I have Lucida Grande paired with Apple LiSung Light.  I get the same problem in that document, and that document alone. I can imagine that an intrusive macro might be doing this, but I can't see any signs of anything.  Maybe it will remain a mystery.

Christopher Cullen

[Magnus Lewan]

Ok. One more guess, if I may. Try applying the "Normal" style. I think there is some option to make sure you reset what was there before. You could try highlighting the text and choose some other style and then "Normal". 

This may "repair" the document, but it has the unsatisfactory consequence that we will not learn what caused the problem. 

To repair the text, you can also copy it and paste it "as text" in another document. 

Have fun!

Magnus

[Christopher Cullen]

Thanks again.  But as I mentioned below, I have already rescued my text by pasting it into a new blank document.  So I am only wondering now what mysterious thing happened to cause this odd behaviour.  Idle curiosity, I suppose …

CC

[Magnus Lewan]

For the record, I searched in the wrong place. I still cannot find 十键, and Tom's observation that it is removed from the info site is a good indication that it is gone.

Nevertheless, someone may find it interesting where it should have been. The image at http://i0.sinaimg.cn/IT/cr/2013/0731/3312089924.jpg is not of input methods, but of keyboard layouts. For Simplified Chinese (简体中文) there is the 10 key option:  十键, QWERTY: 全鍵盤 and AZERTY: 法文键盘. The option QWERTY can be used if you are used to for example a US or a Swedish keyboard to type pinyin. AZERTY is used if you are used to a French keyboard layout. If you are used to German QWERTZ keyboards, you are out of luck.

So the 十键 option does not replace pinyin. It is one of the option one could have used with pinyin. If they had delivered it. What we can use in iOS 7 today is QWERTY and AZERTY and that is the same as in iOS 6.

Cheers

Magnus

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[Tom Gewecke]

Magnus -- do you have the Chinese - English dictionary?

[Tom Gewecke]

Regarding the new dictionary, see the end of this thread

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4315965?start=30&tstart=0

[Magnus Lewan]

Yes. The Chinese dictionary seems decent so far, but I reserve the right to change opinion after further use. The French dictionary misses some really common things like the past participles of "éliminer". They still have some way to go. 

Cheers

Magnus 

[Ant]

I am thinking of upgrading English iOS6 to 7 on an iPhone 4S next week. I assume there are no problems with Chinese?