6.1411, Sum: Pinyin on Macintosh
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Fri Oct 13 14:15:05 UTC 1995
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LINGUIST List: Vol-6-1411. Fri Oct 13 1995. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 278
Subject: 6.1411, Sum: Pinyin on Macintosh
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Date: Thu, 12 Oct 1995 09:56:22 CDT
From: Mark at ccgate.dragonsys.com
Subject: Pinyin on Macintosh: Summary
---------------------------------Messages------------------------------------
1)
Date: Thu, 12 Oct 1995 09:56:22 CDT
From: Mark at ccgate.dragonsys.com
Subject: Pinyin on Macintosh: Summary
I asked for information about typing toned pinyin (the official
Chinese romanization of Mandarin Chinese) on a Macintosh. Eight
people kindly offered information, which I have compiled below. I
have edited their submissions only minimally, with one exception:
mrfahey at Princeton.edu sent a font in BinHex (ASCII-coded) format,
which made 35kb of text. (S)he wrote:
Try this font. I think I downloaded it from a link located on
Human Language Page, but I don't see it there now.
Since I don't know the source of this font and have no assurance
that it isn't proprietary, I will not put it on the LINGUIST
Listserv unless I have good reason to believe it is legitimate to
do so.
Mark A. Mandel
Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200
320 Nevada St. : Newton, Mass. 02160, USA : mark at dragonsys.com
=============== =============== =============== ===============
The following people's responses to my query are compiled below.
leccles at laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au (Lance Eccles)
jcardozo at oregon.uoregon.edu (Jonathan Cardozo)
pdaniels at press-gopher.uchicago.edu
michael at cascadilla.com (Michael Bernstein)
PICARD at VAX2.CONCORDIA.CA (Marc Picard)
mrfahey at Princeton.EDU
nsv+ at andrew.cmu.edu (Ned VanderVen)
knut.vikor at smi.uib.no (Knut S. Vikor)
=============== =============== =============== ===============
leccles at laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au:
Mark,
Your query on Linguist List about pinyin on Macintosh --
I use the Romance font, a Times-lookalike font published by:
Linguists Software
PO Box 580
Edmonds WA 98020-0580
phone (206) 775 1130
fax (206) 771 5911
The layout of the keys is not ideal for typing pinyin, so with ResEdit I've
made myself a keyboard layout for using with Romance. Thus, I've put first
tone on 1, second tone on 2, etc. You can find instructions on how to do
this on p.516 of the Macintosh Bible (5th edition).
Putting tones on i, you should use the dotless i -- anyway the font comes
with readymade i + tones 1, 2, 4.
There are also slightly raised versions of the tone marks for putting about
capitals or above umlaut.
Many of the punctuation marks are in funny places in the Romance font, and
you may want to remap them also.
Lance Eccles
School of Modern Languages
Macquarie University
lance.eccles at mq.edu.au
===============
jcardozo at oregon.uoregon.edu:
Mark,
I run the non-English font archive at the University of oregon.
Accessible on the WWW at http://babel.uoregon.edu/yamada/fonts.html
In our Chinese section (http://babel.uoregon.edu/yamada/fonts/chinese.html)
there is a pinyin font.
I'm not sure it will suit your needs, but you should check it out.
-
jcardozo at oregon.uoregon.edu http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jcardozo
Jonathan Cardozo
Univ.of Oregon:Yamada Language Center, Linguistics, American English Institute
WebMaster of http://babel.uoregon.edu/
===============
pdaniels at press-gopher.uchicago.edu:
The easiest way for you to write in pinyin would be to buy a
Chinese Langauge Kit for your Macintosh; you can then type in
pinyin, bopomofo, traditional, and simplified characters! All for
$295 (last year). You would also need a word processor that can
handle it, and NisusWriter is the best.
However, if you really only want to type romanized Chinese, you
should contact Ecological Linguistics (ecoling at aol.com). I use the
IPATimesExtended font for pinyin, since it has diacritics at two
levels above the letters (so you can put any of the 4 tone marks
above the umlaut). There may well by now also be a dedicated
pinyin font which would require fewer keystrokes to type all the
combinations (a specialty of Ecoligical is software keyboards that
do the most amazing things; for instance, you could probably get
all the accented letters with just two keystrokes each, instead of
the 3 needed to make even the regular acctented letters on a Mac,
e.g. opt-e-e is more keystrokes than we should need to make an e-
acute (or e with second tone).
===============
michael at cascadilla.com:
We could probably create such a font fairly quickly if there's nothing
on the market which is appropriate. We'd put the accents as zero-width
characters into character slots which aren't needed (such as slots
which currently hold Greek letters).
Yours,
Michael Bernstein
Cascadilla Press
michael at cascadilla.com
===============
PICARD at VAX2.CONCORDIA.CA:
You can get the font PINYIN_SEA.HQX;1 at:
YAMADA LANGUAGE GUIDES
http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/
ftp babel.uoregon.edu
Marc Picard
===============
mrfahey at Princeton.EDU:
- ========================_18047564==_
Try this font. I think I downloaded it from a link located on Human Language
Page, but I don't see it there now.
[35kb BinHex block deleted; see intro text above. - MAM]
===============
nsv+ at andrew.cmu.edu:
Hello,
Your inquiry on the Linguist list about typing pinyin on the Macintosh
was forwarded to the Nisus mailing list.
I know of no general method for adding all pinyin tone markers to vowels
in an arbitrary Roman font, but there is a pinyin font available,
supplied as part of "Mishu", an early program for writing Chinese on the
Mac. Mishu seems never to have caught on for serious Chinese writing,
but a Mishu demo that includes the pinyin font can be found on most
info-mac mirrors in
text/mishu-wuhan-204-demo.hqx
Perhaps the developers of Mishu (if they are still in business) would be
willing to license the pinyin font alone for a modest fee.
"Pinyin" is a basic sans-serif font, much like Geneva. You apply a tone
marker by typing a number from 1-4 immediately after the Roman vowel.
The u-dieresis with pinyin marker is made by typing the u-dieresis as
you would for any Roman font: (Option-u u) and then typing the tone mark
number, except that in the Pinyin font the u-dieresis is vertically
compressed so that it is no taller than any other lower-case vowel. This
is done, I suppose, so that all tone markers will be at the same height.
The result is not very pretty.
[some email dialogue cut - MAM]
You will find, if you do any serious amount of writing in pinyin, that
the current method (Option-x, vowel) of adding the acute and grave
accents is unacceptably slow. Even if the hachek and macron were added by
a similar method, and all were extended to u-dieresis, I doubt very much
that there would be great interest from those who use pinyin. To make the
method tolerable, even for vowel-oriented tone marking (see below), you
will need twenty-four new "vowels". [...]
The Pinyin font provided in Mishu goes only part way, replacing the
option-x by the tone number, but it is still vowel-oriented.
In all the programs I know of that use pinyin input for writing Chinese
characters, the method is always to write the tone number at the end of
the pinyin syllable. Users will not like having two different methods of
writing pinyin tone markers, one for inputting characters and the other
for actual writing in pinyin.
As I wrote earlier, it is a mistake, although perhaps a natural one for
those whose native language uses Roman letters, to think of pinyin tone
marking as being vowel-oriented. It is really a marking of pinyin
finals, and any system for writing pinyin should take that into account.
Regards,
Ned VanderVen
Physics, Carnegie Mellon
===============
knut.vikor at smi.uib.no:
[This was forwarded to the Nisus list. You may have received similar
replies on the linguist list]
Many transliteration fonts are, unlike the Apple basic fonts, based on
"free diacritics". This means that, instead of diacritic+character
inserting a new combined character which is independent from either the
diacritic or the base character (and thus has to be predefined in the
font), pressing diacritic simply insert the diacritic's shape without
advancing the cursor (the diacritic character has a width of 0 pixels). In
that case, you can pile as many diacritics as you want on top of one
character. The problem will be with their spacing of them - since each
diacritic is an independent character, it has no awareness of the others
and may easily occupy the same space, just making a muddle.
If I understand you correctly, you have two problems:
a) putting an accent on top of a u/umlaut - that is the only "double"
diacritic.
b) putting graves, aigus, macrons and hacheks on top of other characters
than the predefined e, a, o etc. (macron has no predefined character
combination).
b) is no problem at all - almost all transliteration fonts will allow this.
a) may be so. However, if the transliteration font makes a distinction
between uppercase and lowercase letters, this may be possible. My own set
of fonts, the "Jaghbub" package (actually made for Arabic and Persian) does
so. It has a set of free diacritics, for acute, grave, macron, dot above,
and hachek (caron). Each of these have two placements, low, intended for
lower-case letters, and high, intended for upper-case letters. u/umlaut is
the standard Apple combined diacritic/letter. When you write a lower-case
u/umlaut, and place over it a macron intended for the uppercase-position,
it may give you the distance you need, at least in print (on-screen, the
letters are more compressed, so it does look fairly squashed in most
sizes).
My particular set of fonts were not made for this purpose, so they may or
may not suit your needs; other transliteration fonts may on the same
principle may be more suitable for you.
For the Jaghbub fonts, check
http://www.hf-fak.uib.no/smi/ksv/jaghbub.html
They are freeware and downloadble from this site.
Knut S. Vikor
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