Don’t use…
- … the built-in Pinyin options. Microsoft’s IME is generally awful. If you plan to type Simplified, then it might be acceptable? It’s definitely garbage for traditional. ),
- Baidu or Sogou, unless you like playing fast and loose with data security and privacy. But feel free to make your own choices if your PC only contains your own data.
Do use:
RIME
It supports basically everything you want, including proper traditional chinese punctuation and filtering pinyin by tones.
Installing RIME
The installer & options are unfortunately only in chinese at the time of this writing (although that should change soon). You can use google lens / google translate’s camera feature for now. Once installed it has probably the best IME you can get.
Customizing RIME
If you right click the tray icon and select the option with (S), it opens the settings. The first page is a list of supported layouts. Press 中
to go to the next page, where you can change the theme. Press 中
a final time to save the settings.
If you need to edit files manually, you can find the files for RIME at C:/Program Files (x86)/RIME/Weasel/
on Windows.
The .schema.yaml
files are the ones that define a layout. With a text editor you can change a few things (such as disabling the shift button from enabling alphabet mode, forcing ROC standard characters rather than variant characters used over in Singapore or mainland China (為 instead of 爲 etc.), and more.
Using Terra Pinyin (地球拼音) in RIME
If you want to be able to type not just hao
and get a whole list of Hanzi, but be able to specify which hao
you want (for example, hao4
which among others would give you 號
), you will want to use Terra Pinyin. It’s like normal pinyin you already know, supports typing just the first letter and have it suggest the correct sentence (for example: jttqhh
might suggest 今天天氣很好
), but it also let’s you enter tones.
By default, the tones are entered as follows:
-
is first tone. Soma-
would bemā
, which would give you媽
/
is second tone. Sohui/
would behuí
, which would give you回
<
is third tone. Soma<
would bemǎ
, which would give you馬
\
is fourth tone. Sohui\
would behuì
, which would give you會
.
Using Terra Pinyin with simplified chinese characters
- Drop this file to
C:\Program Files (x86)\RIME\Weasel\data
(note that theWeasel
folder will likely be calledweasel-0.14
or whatever version you installed, instead of just ‘Weasel’. - Then right click the tray icon for RIME, and select the option with (R) to restart.
- Right click the tray icon again, select the one with (S) for settings, then untick all except
地球拼音 (異體字)
. Press the中
button to confirm. - Finally right click the tray icon for RIME, and select the option with (R) to restart RIME a final and last time.