Instructions:

The Chinese Composition Tool is designed for people who wish to compose messages using Chinese Characters but who are using a computer with an English operating system. In order to use this page, you must be able to view web pages that use either the big-5 (traditional) character set, the gb (simplified) character set or Unicode. Internet Explorer should automatically try to install the proper fonts once the encoding has been selected. If that installation fails, there is a company called TwinBridge which has executable files that install the big-5 or gb fonts. Those files can be downloaded here. Unicode fonts should come standard with the latest versions of Windows and Internet Explorer. This tool has only been tested on Internet Explorer.

When using the tool, please do not use the browsers navigation buttons such as back, forward, and refresh. Use of these buttons will cause any message entered to be erased.

The tool itself is fairly simple to use. First, the user must select which encoding to use. This is done by clicking the radio button next to the desired encoding and clicking "choose". This will cause the data entry screen to appear.

In the upper right of the data entry screen, there is a text window. It is here that the message appears.

At the bottom is the character and phrase search window. Characters can be found using the radical (which is selected from the list of radicals on the right), Additional Strokes, Total Strokes, Phonetic Spelling, English Meaning, or Pinyin. The Phonetic spelling and Pinyin correspond to the Mandarin pronunciation of the character. Cantonese pronunciations will be included at a later date.

For examples of Pinyin and Phonetic Spellings of several characters, click here.

To compose a Chinese message, a search must be performed to find each character in the message using one of the search methods above. Using the list of Phonems, the user can enter the phonetic spelling of a character by clicking on each phonem. Alternately, the user can enter values into the other fields by typing.

When the user clicks the "Find Characters" button, a list of Characters or phrases satisfying the search criterea will appear in the space left of the text window. (Phrases will be enclosed in parentheses.) Clicking on any of these characters or phrases will cause that character or phrase to be added to the text window.

The database of common Mandarin phrases will be searched if the phonem or pinyin fields contain phonems or pinyin, with tones, for the first two characters of the phrase separated by a space. In addition, searches for a particular English meaning will return any phrases having that English meaning.

Characters added to the text window will be inserted at the flashing cursor position. The cursor in the text window behaves exactly the same as for an English Message. For instance, clicking in the middle of a sentence will cause the next character added to be added at that position. Also, the arrow keys and keys like insert and delete behave like always. In addition, cut and paste work as always. And English can be added to the message by simply typing.

Clicking the button "Phrases" will cause the user to be prompted to choose a character for which the phrase database should be searched. When a character is clicked, all phrases starting with that character will be shown. Clicking on a phrase will add the phrase to the message.

Clicking the "View Character Info" button followed by a character or phrase will display the data that has been entered for that phrase or character.

If a character is not found then the "Search Character Set" button can be clicked. The user should enter the number of strokes in the desired character and click the "Look Up" Button. A list of all characters with the desired number of strokes will appear. Clicking on a character will cause the character to be added to the text window.

Once the message has been written, the contents of the text box can be used in other programs by using the standard windows copy and paste functions. To do this, the user can move the mouse into the text window and click the right mouse button. From the menu that pops up, the user can select "copy." The user can then open any program she chooses and paste the text. It is up to the user to verify that a program can accept the text. (Word, for example, works if the correct font is chosen.) We recommend testing first with a small amount of text before attempting to use a large amount of text.

One possible use of this tool is to reply to emails using Chinese. When using a web-based email program like Yahoo, it is important to make sure that the encoding for the window into which the text is being pasted matches the encoding that was used to enter the message. To verify this, the user can select the encoding under the view menu. The user may also consider sending herself a copy of the email to verify that it was sent correctly.

The author of this website would like to thank the following websites for providing much of the data used for the character searches: CEdict and Chih-Hao Tsai's Frequency and Stroke Counts of Chinese Characters. An excellent resource for computing using Mandarin and learning Mandarin is MandarinTools.com

If you like this tool and find it useful, all we ask is that you tell your friends about it so they can use it to. The tool can be found at http://chinesecomp.no-ip.com.

If you have any questions about the tool, wish to comment on it, or would like to report a bug, the author of the page can be reached at kevinpond@attbi.com.

Users may refer to these instructions at any time by scrolling the window that contains the message. These instructions will appear below the text box.