Using umlauts with Chinese

[trefish]

I'm using Nisus Writer Pro to type in Chinese characters, and I haven't been able to work out what to input for umlauts. The usual Option+U isn't doing anything for me; I can get U's with umlauts to show up if I switch my Mac's "international" settings back to U.S., but when I switch back to ITABC, the words I've typed with umlauts are not recognized. Does anybody know how to type umlauts for this purpose?

[Ruchama]

I have a guess- I hope it helps you- in the international preference window- did you check the "allow different input sources for the same document" ? (bottom left) I never tried it but it seems to me that if you did not- this behavior is explained..

[trefish]

Thank you for your reply - I seem to already have that box checked, though.

It seems like this may be more of a question relating to Apple's International Settings rather than Nisus, since I can't seem to type umlauts when writing in Chinese in any program. I suppose that this isn't the place for this question, then.

[Elbrecht]

Not sure I understand your problem correctly -

but if in Simplified Chinese, do you have a Secondary Font selected in Nisus/Preferences/Languages/Chinese (Simplified)? There seems to be selected none by default - over against in case of Chinese (Traditional)...

Chinese fonts include German Umlaute for Pinyin transliteration now, but not all mostly older ones. But I would prefer Western style fonts for transliteration, that's why Secondary Font comes in! In case you want to write strictly Chinese you would have to choose between Half-/Full-Width Latin characters - but that's another cup of tea.

Hope this helps somehow
HE

[xiamenese]

Standard pinyin, for ü vowels type v, ie lü enter as lv.

lv = 绿 lu = 路

QED


Mark

Further suggestion added later: have a look at QIM with QIT. Much better than the Apple input system; works better, customisable, switching between simplified and traditional characters done within QIM, no need to have separate editor, no need to switch to Wubi-whatever to get Chinese punctuation marks like listing-comma 、QIT extends it to allow you to type up to whole sentences that it will learn.

Small cost, but very well worth it in my opinion.

[trefish]

Thank you, xiamenese, that solves my problem perfectly. I wouldn't have thought to try 'v' otherwise.

(Other than that, though, I haven't had any problems.)

[xiamenese]

Thank you, xiamenese, that solves my problem perfectly. I wouldn't have thought to try 'v' otherwise.

(Other than that, though, I haven't had any problems.)

Glad to have helped. But I do seriously recommend you give QIM a try ... you can use it for free, but paying the USD20 brings you benefits in terms of customisability, recording strings used for simple repeats and so on. QIT extends that so that it will parse up to whole sentences typed in pinyin, getting more accurate the more you use it.
For me, the fact that Chinese punctuation is directly accessible is a great boon, as is being able to shift between 简体 and 繁体 at a touch of shift-space, rather than having to change editors for those tasks.
You can also customise the selection palette in terms of font, font size and character/background colours to whatever suits you best. Makes it more readable than the ITabc one.
Give it a try ... you have nothing to lose.


Mark