google pinyin

[xue ni]

i have been trying to get google pinyin on my laptop, but it's not working at all.. i have tried to change the language on my pc too,not working as well. It's asking me for win service pack 2 when i have win service pack 3.

so is there a way to type in chinese on my pc? any other programs that could allow me to do so???

Thanks!!!

[彭浩轩]

I think this is the wrong board to ask this question in.... but I'm not a moderator, and I can answer your question, so I will, and let someone else deal with telling you where you ought to have posted this. xD

Moved

Do you want to type in Chinese characters, or in Pinyin?

If you simply want to type in Chinese characters, just go to Control Panel --> Region and Language --> Keyboards and Languages --> Change Keyboards and then click the "add" button and find "Chinese" in the list, and choose which keyboard you want to use, be it Simplified PRC, Traditional HK, Traditional Taiwan, etc.

However, if you want to type in Pinyin, you will need some third-party software or patch to make it work, as windows does not come with a built-in Pinyin keyboard. I have heard of people using the Catalan or Portugese or other European keyboards to "fake" pinyin, but this is sloppy, and I believe it won't allow for tone markings over the ü. I use PinyinPut -- which I actually found through a thread on this forum. http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/10274-pinyinput-type-pinyin-with-tone-marks/ . Pinyinput says it's 32-bit only, but I use it on 64-bit Windows 7 just fine (although it has minor quirks in certain programs).

If you use firefox, you could also try the firefox pinyin input extension. It let's you type like this: Ni3 Hao3, and then highlight the text, click a button, and automatically convert it to pinyin. The plugin can be found here: http://toshuo.com/chinese-tools/pinyin-input-firefox-extension/

[skylee]

as windows does not come with a built-in Pinyin keyboard

Is this true?

This thread might help. IIRC the consensus is sougou IME is better. And it is what I am using now.

[彭浩轩]

as windows does not come with a built-in Pinyin keyboard

Is this true?

As far as I know, Windows does not have a keyboard that allows you to directly output pinyin, as you can with the other IME's... I could be mistaken though; I didn't spend much time digging around for it.

[gato]

Sougou pinyin is better than Google pinyin and uses less memory

[skylee]

Re posts #2-4, I now understand that 彭浩轩 was talking about pinyin "output", not input.