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Shusaku -

I recently developed a simple Cantonese input method which supports both the Yale and Jyutping
romanization systems (there is a Mandarin pinyin mode as well). 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. The program is Java based and should run on any
OS with a Java runtime environment.

If anybody would like to try this program, it can be downloaded from:

http://home.comcast.net/~jbmbweb/cantoinput/index.html

Please let me know if you find this useful!



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Shusaku -

Update:

I just finished a new version of CantoInput (1.01) with compound word support. The included
mapping files contain all of the 2 and 3 character words from CEDICT. The program is now available
for download.










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!










Shusaku -

Thanks for the feedback, Quest. Now that you mention it, there was one other user who also told me
that IE renames CantoInput.jar to CantoInput.zip - technically these are the same format, but I
have no idea why IE would do this as it then needs to be renamed back to CantoInput.jar in order
for users to start it by double-clicking. At any rate, I decided to just package CantoInput.jar
inside a ZIP file so that users won't need to worry about renaming the file after using IE to
download it - they can just extract the ZIP and now they'll see the executable JAR.










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.










Shusaku -

Atitarev - No, it isn't yet possible to define character mappings outside those .utf-8 files that
you see inside the jar file. You can edit those if you want for now, but eventually I'd like to
add a more user-friendly way of doing this.

I didn't bother doing anything with those HKSCS-specific characters like the "lift" character. I
generally avoid using these seeing as so few people have their system set up to support this
character set. I did add support for the most common Cantonese colloquial characters (i.e. 哋,
嘅, 嗰, 啲, etc.) since most people can see these without installing extra software.

Sorry, the code isn't open source. I may open it up later after I've had time to clean things up a
bit.










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.










Shusaku -

The CantoInput download page has changed (see original post for new address). Hopefully it won't
be moving for a while now. Please update your bookmarks. Thanks!












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