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Reflections on a Wandering Life.....
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
Stayed up half the night trying to find the IME (Input Method Editor) for Simplified Chinese. I'm in the process of configuring my new laptop. I run XP in English, with Asian language support. Turns out there is no IME for Office 2003. The configuration is very simple. So simple it stumped me. In the past, I have always had to download an IME specific for Simplified Chinese. So all my searching was a waste of time, except that, in the process, I managed to come across an add-in that allows you to type characters by stroke order rather than by Pinyin. I don't think I'm ready for that yet, because my knowledge of stroke order isn't good enough, but I would like to try it sometime.
The Microsoft website is a nightmare. It never tells you that the IME for Office 2003 does not exist. It keeps trying to direct you to the general area. Out of sympathy for others who may have struggled with the same absurdity that kept me up half the night, I wrote a brief tutorial.
Although there has been significant improvement in language support in recent software versions, I do sometimes run into issues. Before I came to China, I took pains to incorporate Global Language Support into the database creation regimen I have developed for students. I wrote the change into the database creation script, so that the database we create is based on Unicode. We still have some problems, but I am developing scripts to address them as we go.
As an English speaker in China, though, I sometimes encounter a reverse form of the problem. Sometimes, when I am looking for something on the Internet, if I identify my location as China, I am referred to a Chinese language version of the web site. On some occasions, it doesn't even give me a choice. There are times when the website is configured to read my IP address, and assign language by default. But most of the time, there is something in the identifying information, such as my address, that triggers it. I speak English. I live in China. I would strongly prefer to do business with companies that can accommodate those two realities at the same time.
The Microsoft website is a nightmare. It never tells you that the IME for Office 2003 does not exist. It keeps trying to direct you to the general area. Out of sympathy for others who may have struggled with the same absurdity that kept me up half the night, I wrote a brief tutorial.
Although there has been significant improvement in language support in recent software versions, I do sometimes run into issues. Before I came to China, I took pains to incorporate Global Language Support into the database creation regimen I have developed for students. I wrote the change into the database creation script, so that the database we create is based on Unicode. We still have some problems, but I am developing scripts to address them as we go.
As an English speaker in China, though, I sometimes encounter a reverse form of the problem. Sometimes, when I am looking for something on the Internet, if I identify my location as China, I am referred to a Chinese language version of the web site. On some occasions, it doesn't even give me a choice. There are times when the website is configured to read my IP address, and assign language by default. But most of the time, there is something in the identifying information, such as my address, that triggers it. I speak English. I live in China. I would strongly prefer to do business with companies that can accommodate those two realities at the same time.
