Installing Japanese Support and Writing Japanese on a Mac

[spidey]

Seems like I've followed the advice put forward here but for some reason nothing happens when I key the following:

highlight-shift-CTRL-R

What I do instead is just highlight and click on the abc ABC icon and it gives me furigana.

It's not always the right reading, but it's the best I'm able to do.


s

[untmdsprt]

There is a comprehensive (177 pages!) reference document, from the time of System 9 but still applicable, on the Apple Web site. It contains essentially everything you will ever need to know on the kotoeri input system — and incidentally also on Chinese and Korean input!
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=50037

Starting with Leopard, Apple has now put all menus in English, and has an extensive help guide for kotoeri in English. I've found it also has a list of romaji based commands to get the different characters. Some examples: du - づ, xa - ぁ, xi - ぃ. The latter being like かなぁ。Only thing I wish Apple would have done is when there is more kanji, an English definition would have been nice of which one to use. The commands can be printed out if you'd like.

[reboundstudent]

On a Mac running 10.4, is there any way to draw a kanji? On the PC, you can use a sort of sketchpad, and it will give you a selection of kanji that seem closest to what you've drawn. The closest I can get on my Mac is a list of radicals. Any suggestions?

[Belton]

Unfortunately there isn't Japanese handwriting recognition on the Mac.
There used to be a third party solution on sale in Japan, but that is now discontinued. Even if you can find it I believe there are compatibility problems.
http://www.shiawase.co.uk/2008/04/30/ma ... comment-13

The only written input for kanji I know of is for single kanji search in JEdict.
www.jedict.com
And it's a bit crude.

[soniak]

I'm on OS 10.5.6. I'm able finally to access kana, ヤェーイ ! thanks to the discussion in this forum, but nothing I do turns onna or onnna or おんな to kanji.

I did a search for kotoeri on Spotlight and nothing came up. I must have Japanese Language enabled or I wouldn't have the kana available. I'm stumped. Please help me or else I will lose my whole weekend reading that 177 page PDF!!! thx

[Psy]

I've never even heard of this happening right after setting it up. You're sure you're typing 'o n n n a' followed by space (or maybe two for the window, depending on your preferences), right? If you're in hiragana mode there is no reason this shouldn't work. You should at least be getting kanji candidates for things you type.

[soniak]

Well now you've heard of it. And I'd love to get some help.

[minanatae]

Will this work for a laptop or a Windows PC?

[untmdsprt]

I'm on OS 10.5.6. I'm able finally to access kana, ヤェーイ ! thanks to the discussion in this forum, but nothing I do turns onna or onnna or おんな to kanji.

I did a search for kotoeri on Spotlight and nothing came up. I must have Japanese Language enabled or I wouldn't have the kana available. I'm stumped. Please help me or else I will lose my whole weekend reading that 177 page PDF!!! thx

Go to System Prefs, International, and then Input Menu. What do you have checked? On my system, I have Hiragana, and Romaji checked. Since I've found no difference between Romaji and the US keyboard, I left the US keyboard unchecked.

To switch between your selections hold  and then hit the spacebar. Once you see a "あ" next to the time, you can start typing in Japanese. For おんな, type onnna, and then hit the spacebar once to get the most common kanji for it. Hit it twice to bring up a menu of all kanji associated with おんな.

BTW, the kotoeri menu won't show until you switch to hiragana or romaji mode.

Hope this helps!

[soniak]

OMG OMG OMG!!!! 語彙!！ I was trying to get the kanji for 凄い。Since I don't recognize but a few kanji it will take me some time to recognize. But this is truly amazing. Thank you soooooo much. You made my day...and it's midnight already - but this is life-changing for me. Thank you!

[Duality]

Wewt! I love you guys for supporting OSX. Excellent stuff. I was familiar with the process on Windows but not yet on OSX.

ありがとうございます! (It works!)... I'm not supposed to use spaces now, am I? Eeep.

[kraemder123_502787]

Is there a way to modify the shortcut to toggle between romaji and hiragana input? The default is CTRL SHIFT (; or J) and that's a bit awkward to type. hmm I'm not using an official mac keyboard so I sometimes goof the names.. I know I can type apple/command (one of the two, on my keyboard it's ALT) + SPACE to change input methods... but that brings up a menu and isn't quite as fast.

On Windowz I could type ALT ~ and it just toggled. Really nice.