Windows 10 Pro X64 Japanese Iso
Damiane Burgun
I am by no means a professional with computers, I just wanted to share my experience so that anyone that is struggling with Japanese and the Colemak keyboard can have yet another approach to enable them (and myself whenever I forget) to write in japanese with a colemak keyboard.
The main motivation behind this post is that, all the other approaches that I have been able to find are, either short responses to user queries that redirect you somewhere, or approaches that I found somewhat inconvenient due to the fact that I have a custom colemak layout (ES colemak with Caps as Backspace) that I wanted to keep when writing in japanese.
See my signature. EPKL is a program for running layouts and more, very useful stuff. It can also remap your Caps key, even into something much better than a Backspace: An Extend key. Again, this is all described in the Big Bag.
So far I've been using the remapping on the windows registry, and it worked just fine, untill some days ago when an update changed back the .dll file to the original japanese keyboard layout. But I'm remapping again :)
1. .reg file creation
you can also create .reg file that will do the update for you just by double clicking it. In my case it looks for japanese like this:
updatejapcolemak.reg
create any text file, input the text above and rename it to .reg
1.b if you are afraid of unknown changes (you should be) you can generate the .reg file yourself:
go to japanese keyboard layout in regedit as shown in the tutorial above and click file -> export -> name your new reg file and click save. Then right click on the .reg file -> edit and leave only the Windows text line, [PATH] line and "Layout File" line to replace only the Layout file(edit contents ow the Layout file line with your colemak.dll name.
2. no colemak during inputing hiragana fix
I had to also set use previous windows IME version to true in Settings -> Time & Language -> Language -> Japanese -> Options -> Microsoft IME (under Keyboards) -> Options -> General -> switch Use previous version of Microsoft IME to ON (under Compatibility)
to have colemak layout when inputting hiragana with romaji, otherwise only the keyboard when japanese input was turned off was switched to colemak.
4. regedit navigation shortcut
you can copy path to registry in regedit like HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layouts\00000411 and then right click on path in regedit to paste it and go there directly instead of opening the folder tree on the left.
Next click the "Advanced" tab and where it says "Code pageconversion tables" you need to check "Japanese" and click"Apply". Until you do this Japanese will not be an option in certainplaces. I don't remember if you have to reboot at this point or not.
There are two problems with this setting though. One is aesthetic, the defaultsystem font becomes a font that supports Japanese and in non unicode Japanesethe character / becomes . That can be confusing since all paths almostanywhere in Windows will now have that symbol instead of . For exampleC:\windows\system32 becomes c:windowssystem32.
The second issue is that some programs look at this setting to decide whatlanguage to install in. Two that come to mind are Apple's Quicktime and Nero CD. In order to install them in English you need to set this setting back toEnglish, reboot, install, set it back to Japanese, reboot.
Note that the language settings are PER PROGRAM!! That means if we were inEnglish, ran two programs, in one program we went to the language bar andpicked Japanese when we switched back to the other program it would still be inEnglish input mode. This can be confusing. Another thing, unless some programis active that accepts text input some of the settings will not be available.So, open Notepad and keep it active while trying the follow stuff below.
They are in order from top to bottom, Hiragana, Full Width Katakana, Full WidthEnglish, Half Width Katakana, Half Width English, Direct Input. The only 2 youreally care about are Hiragana and Direct Input. Direct Input is English. Youtype, you get English just like Windows was before you did all this stuff. Setit to Hiragana and you can type romanji like "toru" and you'llsee とる instead. The underline means the Input Method Editor (IME), the thing thatdoes this is waiting for you to decide what you want to do with thosecharacters. If you press ENTER theywill be entered as is, If you press space once the IME will turn them into themost common thing they could be OR the last thing you told it to change themtoo. Press space again and you'll get a list of things it could be. Forexample on the second press I got this
The left window is a list of all the things the IME thinks it could change とるinto. Use the cursor keys to select one. Generally the last thing on the listis katakana, in this case トル, that's why you never need to use the specialKatakana input modes since you can just press space twice to get there. Alsothe list wraps so if you are at the top, press the up key and you'll go tothe bottom. Plus, if you type something that would normally be katakana likeてれび on the first space press it will become the most common thing which is テレビ.
On the right window are all the various homonym definitions for toru withexamples. The first one for example is 取る as in to take a note, take a fee. The3rd one is 撮る as in take a picture. Very useful, even many Japanese oftenforget which one is correct, especially the less common ones.
TIP: switching between Hiragana input mode and Direct Input mode through the language bar is tedious. Instead you can switch by pressing Alt-Tilde (the key below ESC on your keyboard). So, need to type Japanese, press Alt-Tilde, start typing. When you are done press Alt-Tilde again to switch back to English.
Let's say you want to enter 今締める so you type いましめる. When you press space you'll get this 戒める. Pressing space again will not give you the completion you want. That'sbecause the IME is trying to make a word out of all 5 characters. To tell it touse less hold shift and press the left arrow. Each time you do less ofcharacters will be highlighted. Press it 3 times until you get this いましめる then press space again. This time the IME will only look up the first twocharacters. Most likely this time it will become this 今しめる. Notice the gap between 今 and しめる. This means the IME is considering those twowords separately. Also the underline under 今 is thicker than the one under しめるindicating that 今 is the current thing the IME is concentrating on. To completethe second word press the right arrow. The underline under しめる will get thickerand you can press space to complete it and choose 締める.
In *normal* Japanese each character takes the same space. They are fixed size fonts. Check out any Japanese writing textbook and you'll see each character is supposed to fit into a box. For graphic design sometimes Japanese use proportional fonts but generally, much more than in English, lots of stuff is in a fixed size font.
Full Width means a character that fills one of those boxes. Half Width means a character that only fits half the box. Technically in the computer half width means it takes a single byte, full width means it takes more than one byte.
The place this mostly comes up is on internet forms. Lots of forms will ask for your name in full width character then again in katakana in half-width. They'll ask for address in full width but postal code and phone number in half width.
Note: When typing in Hiragana mode pressing the space when there is nothing else typed will insert a full width space. That's usually what you want when typing Japanese but if you need a normal English space you can insert a half-width space while in Hiragana mode by pressing Shift-Space.
The ones on the left are just shortcuts for the options that were on the menuthat brought you here. The most interesting are probably "by strokecount" which lets you lookup kanji by number of strokes and "bypart" which lets you look them up by a particular part. They should bepretty obvious. In all of them the area on the right shows possible kanji.Click one to enter it in the IME. Press enter to add it to your document.
Proper Japanese dictionary for Windows?2012/12/18 00:58 I've been using a couple of Android apps on my phone to help translating english word to kanji/kana/romaji, and to look up kanji. I'm looking for something similar that I can run on Windows (regular computer, no tablet/phone/mobile). I also need it to run entirely offline.
On Android, I've been using these:
* JED: =com.umibouzu.jed
* Obenkyo: =com.Obenkyo
* KanjiRecognizer: =org.nick.kanjirecognizer
The last one is probably going to be a hard call on windows, since it requires drawing kanji, and that's hard to do with a mouse :)
But what I'm really looking for is something like the first mentioned app (JED). This is "just" a dictionary, but one that's loaded with information and has many ways to search.
Now to find something that runs on a computer...
I've searched google for a while, but all I could find is BS software and a windows8 app (which I cannot run). Lots of stuff that looks like adware and other BS, and maybe one or two that were way too expensive in comparison.
I already do have Human Japanese on my computer, but it doesn't have much of a dictionary.
Any help will be greatly appreciated.by thany
Re: Proper Japanese dictionary for Windows?2012/12/18 18:32 Thanks for the links, I'll check them out.
Jim Breen's page looks daunting O.o
As for ZKanji, how stupid of me that I didn't think of looking at SF.net, there's always some interesting/promising project going on. Thanks for finding that for me ;)by thanyrate this post as useful
Re: Proper Japanese dictionary for Windows?2012/12/19 03:04 builds on the Edict files as kept by Jim Breen but as you asked for an offline dictionary, this might be of interest although I hven't used it myself:
If you use Firefox, Rikachan ( ) will be worth looking intoby Hoshisatorate this post as useful