Chinese in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

Installation

Under the Language tab in System Preferences... International, you will find a list of languages supported by OS X 10.5. The language at the top of the list is the default system language, used by the Finder and applications whenever possible. Use "Edit List..." to remove languages from the list altogether, or add new ones.

If Chinese is not installed, you can add it by running the "Optional Installs" package on the DVD and choosing the Traditional Chinese and/or Simplified Chinese "Language Translations" in the Installation Type panel.

The "Order for sorted lists" pop-up menu has seven choices that affect Chinese:

  1. Standard ~ Sorts first by Unicode CJK Unified Ideographs (CJKUI) block, then radical, then strokes. Extensions A and B follow, each sorted by radical, then strokes.
  2. Standard (unihan) ~ Sorts all three CJKUI blocks together by radical, then strokes.
  3. Chinese ~ Sorts by pronunciation, in Hanyu Pinyin romanization.
  4. Chinese (Pinyin Order) ~ Same as above.
  5. Chinese (Simplified Chinese (GB2312)) ~ Sorts by GB code.
  6. Chinese (Stroke Order) ~ Sorts by strokes, then radical.
  7. Chinese (Traditional Chinese (Big5)) ~ Sorts by Big Five code.

Note: With the exception of "Standard (unihan)", all of the above only sort the CJKUI block. Extensions A and B follow, each sorted by radical, then strokes.

To see if an application can be localized for Chinese (i.e., run with menus and dialogs in Chinese), select its icon in the Finder and choose Get Info from the File menu. See the Languages section of the window that opens. Apple uses "zh_CN" for Simplified Chinese and "zh_TW" for Traditional Chinese. To localize an application for Chinese, simply uncheck all languages listed above Chinese in the Language tab (see above).

Troubleshooting:

  • You may need to use the File Name Encoding Repair utility to see Chinese file and folder names created in OS 9 and earlier.

Fonts

Six kinds of Chinese-capable fonts are installed in Leopard:

  • Five GB 18030 fonts:
    • In the /System/Library/Fonts folder: 华文黑体 ST Hei Regular (STHeiti) and 华文细黑 ST Hei Light (STXihei).
    • In the /Library/Fonts folder: 华文楷体 ST Kai Regular (STKaiti), 华文宋体 ST Song Regular (STSong), and 华文仿宋 ST Fangsong Regular (STFangsong).
  • Two GB 2312 fonts:
    • In the /Library/Fonts folder: Hei and Kai.
  • Two Big-5E plus HKSCS-2001 fonts:
    • In the /System/Library/Fonts folder: LiHei 儷黑 Pro.
    • In the /Library/Fonts folder: LiSong 儷宋 Pro.
  • Three standard Big Five fonts:
    • In the /Library/Fonts folder: Apple LiGothic, Apple LiSung, and BiauKai.
  • Arial Unicode MS is installed in the /Library/Fonts folder. Includes the Unicode CJK Unified Ideographs block.
  • A GB 18030 bitmap font is installed in the /Library/Fonts folder.

If your OS X installation is missing any Chinese fonts, you can add them by running the "Optional Installs" package on the DVD and choosing "Additional Fonts" in the Installation Type panel.

Getting Started

Input Menu

Under the Input Menu tab in System Preferences... International, you will find check boxes that activate the components of the Chinese input methods and causes them to appear in the Input menu. Make sure that the "Show input menu in menu bar" box is also checked. You can also check the Character Palette box to make it appear, and so on:

Input menu prefs

"Keyboard Shortcuts..." leads to the Keyboard Shortcuts tab in System Preferences... Keyboard & Mouse, you will find two keyboard shortcuts listed under the "Input Menu" heading:

  • Command-space [⌘Space] ~ Selects the previous input source. Toggles back and forth between the last two input sources selected in the Input menu.
  • Option-command-space [⌥⌘Space] ~ Selects the next input source. Cycles through the keyboards and input methods in the Input menu.

The Chinese input methods and plug-ins you choose will appear right away in the Input menu itself, which appears on the right side of the Menu bar:

Input menu

To activate a keyboard or input method, choose it from the menu. Its icon will appear in the Menu bar and it will have a check mark beside it in the menu. In the above example, the U.S. keyboard is followed by two Japanese input modes and then ITABC, the built-in Simplified Chinese Pinyin input method. Next are the two new Traditional Chinese input methods, Zhuyin and Pinyin, and then QIM, a third-party Pinyin input method that supports both Simplified and Traditional Chinese. The last item in the first section is Biaoyin 2, a plug-in input method for typing Chinese romanizations.

Help

One new feature in Mac OS X 10.5 is the built-in Chinese input methods include a full set of English-language help instructions. To access this Help, select an input mode in the Input menu. Its extended menu will appear, with Help at the bottom.

In ITABC, for example, it will look like this:

ITABC menu

What's New in Leopard

In addition to English-language Help, there are four upgrades that affect Chinese support in OS X 10.5:

  1. In Spotlight, "a new Chinese tokenizer intelligently parses the search characters to factor in their relationship and meaning with one another, ensuring the most relevant results."
  2. There are improvements in the underlying support for Windows TrueType fonts and collections. Fonts that set off alarms in Tiger usually do not do so in Leopard. This includes the comprehensive simsun.ttc/simsunb.ttf and mingliu.ttc/mingliub.ttf Windows Vista Chinese fonts, which contain the many thousands of rare Chinese glyphs that are in Unicode but still missing in Mac OS X.
  3. Plug-in input methods are easier to install and more functional than ever before. You simply create a plain-text source file, change the file extension to either ".inputplugin" (for the Apple format) or ".cin" (a common open-source format), and then place it in the /Library/Input Methods folder or your Home ~/Library/Input Methods folder.
  4. Last, but not least, there are two new Traditional Chinese input modes, "Pinyin" and "Zhuyin". These are nothing like the old TCIM input modes with the same names and icons:
    • The new Pinyin input method is basically a traditional-Chinese version of ITABC with tone numbers instead of shapes/strokes.
    • The new Zhuyin input method is the same, but uses Zhuyin instead of Pinyin.
    • ITABC itself (which still uses shapes/strokes) has also been updated, with some changes to its key sequences.
    • In sum, these three input modes now all use a unified approach, despite their differences. This makes switching from one to another much easier.

    Note: An undocumented aspect of the new Pinyin input mode is its access to the Jiegou Pinyin input mode, which has been embedded in ITABC since OS X 10.3. Note that this is no longer invoked via the return key. Instead, shift+spacebar is used.

Character Palette

In Cocoa applications, the Character Palette is always accessible via Edit > Special Characters... There are multiple ways to view Chinese characters. To input characters into text in an application, just double-click on the character you want, or use the "Insert" button:

  • Simplified Chinese displays the GB 18030 character set. You can look for characters both in the "by Radical" tab (shown below, includes both Simplified and Traditional characters) and the "by Category" tab (Unicode blocks). If you highlight a character and then pause the mouse over it, a little info panel will appear, giving the UTF-16, UTF-8, and GB code points:

Character Palette SC

  • Traditional Chinese allows you to look for characters in the "by Radical" tab. If you highlight an indivdual character and then pause the mouse over it, a little info panel will appear, giving the UTF-16, UTF-8, and Big-5E and/or HKSCS-2001 code points:

Character Palette TC

  • All Characters displays all of the characters defined in Unicode. Chinese characters are found in the "by Radical" tab.
  • Code Tables displays Chinese characters in both the "Unicode" tab and the "Other Encodings" tab. Other Encodings provides tables of four Chinese encodings: Big-5E, HKSCS-2001, GB2312, and GB18030.
  • Glyph displays the complete contents of the selected font.

In the Character Info section (shown above), you will find a list of characters related to the selected character, along with the input key sequences for the Apple input methods. You can drag/copy any character from an application and drop/paste it into the Character Info section to get information about that character.

In the Font Variation section (shown above), you can see all available glyphs for the selected character in the different fonts on the system. In addition, you can choose between "glyph variants" for a single Unicode character. Currently, the only fonts that contain glyph variants are Japanese: the Hiragino fonts and Adobe's Kozuka Pro fonts. Try U+9957, for example. Not all applications support glyph variants.

The pop-up menu in the bottom left of the palette provides access to Font Book via "Manage Fonts..."

Pop-up

If you select a character in an application like TextEdit or Pages and then choose "Show Character Selected in Application" in the Character Palette, it will jump to that character.

Last but not least, there is the search window at the bottom right of the palette. Here you can search for Chinese characters using their Hanyu Pinyin readings, in two categories, Simplified Chinese (the GB 18030 character set) Pinyin and Traditional Chinese Pinyin. Double-click on a character in the list of search results to bring it up in the Character Palette.

Search

You can also search for Zhuyin readings, Japanese readings, Korean readings, Unicode character names, code points, and so on.

Mail 3.0

Mail 3.0 is fully Unicode-savvy and can be localized for Chinese. It automatically sets the encoding of outgoing messages based on content. If your system is set to run in English (in the Language tab of System Preferences... International), or anything other than Chinese or Japanese, the default encoding for outgoing Chinese messages is UTF-8. When the system language is set to Traditional Chinese, the default is Big Five. For Simplified Chinese it is GB 2312. For Japanese it is ISO-2022-JP.

Mail 3.0 allows you to manually set the encoding of an outgoing message (and subject) in Message > Text Encoding. Note that "Simplified Chinese (EUC)" sets the charset name to GB2312.

Safari 3.0

Safari 3.0 is Unicode-savvy. Page titles and bookmarks in Chinese are all displayed properly. To reset the encoding of a web page, use Text Encoding in the View menu. The direct Google search window works well with Chinese (also Japanese and Korean). Just enter the Chinese text and Safari does the search correctly.