How to enable handwriting recognition and other features for East Asian languages
Many who use one of the East Asian languages would agree that the alphabet is not very convenient. In XP, there were a couple of plugins (Windows calls them Applets) that allowed handwriting recognition as well as a radical dictionary, just to name a few of the applets. These applets are very useful for those who cannot recognize characters or anyone learning one of the languages. This tutorial will bring all these applets back. (This tutorial is mainly geared towards those that do not have a handwriting pad since I’m sure your pad was bundled with software that solves these problems.)
For this example, we will use Chinese, but the instructions apply to the other languages as well. First, you’ll need to have your language bar visible. If it’s not visible, you can refer to this guide.
Your language bar should lo
Click on the small arrow on the very left and select IME pad.
You should be able to see the IME Pad icon in your language bar now. Click on it and a window will come up.
Click on the icon beside IME Pad at the very top, select Applet Menu, and then User Settings.
Once at this Window, select the button beside “Show Applets for all IME” and you will see a list of all the Applets you are looking for. Right now you only have Dictionary. Select one and click on Add to enable them.
(CH) - Chinese
(JA) - Japanese
(KO) - Korean
A list of the enabled Applets are shown on the side. Right now I am using the handwriting applet. The handwriting applet is not perfect, but despite my horrible writing skills, you can see that the IME Pad is still able to recognize what I’m writing.
As for my mouse handwriting skills… I definitely need to work on them.
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July 4th, 2008 at 10:01 am
Thank you so much for that, I have been cursing all afternoon trying to find a solution to not having the handwriting pad, and there it was all along!
July 20th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Three questions if I may…
1) Within the ime pad, I can only find “hand writing (JA)” and “hand writing(KO), but I cannot find “hand writing (CH)”. how can I set that up?
2) I can only get this ime pad to show up with “Chinese (Traditional, Taiwan)”. Is there a way to get it to show up for “Chinese (Simplified, PRC)” or even “Chinese (Traditional, HK SAR)”?
3) Is this ime pad supposed to be able to allow me to recognize simplified chinese characters and output simplified chinese characters? The reason I ask is that, not being an able simplified chinese reader myself, i find myself needing to looking up simplified->traditional tranlation a lot. I can cut & paste simplified characters into translators found on the web, but not in the case when I am reading hard copies of simplified text.
Thanks.
Patrick.
September 15th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Your tutorial on “How to enable handwriting recognition and other features for East Asian languages” is very informative. However, what do I do if the Hand Writing (CH) icon (on the left panel), as shown in your example, is not available for selection? In my particular situation, only the Japanese and Korean Hand Writing icons are available–No Chinese.
Please reply
September 15th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Try installing or enabling the Chinese keyboard on your computer
September 15th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
Thank you for your response.
I installed all Chinese (Traditional) Taiwan and all Chinese (Simplifed) PRC keyboards and still cannot get the Chinese Handwriting icon. However, I experimented with the Japanese Handwriting IME pad after loading it. I regret that my knowledge of Chinese is very limited and none for Japanese. BUT I discovered the Japanese Handwriting IME Pad to be useful. I tested it with several Traditional Chinese words and the Japanese Handwriting IME Pad is able to correctly recognize them.
There is a difference between the Chinese IME Pad (in my old XP computer) and the Japanese IME Pad, the Chinese IME Pad accept Simplified text (such as ?and ?), but the Japanese IME Pad does not. This is significant. I am learning Chinese and have a need to input in both Simplified and Traditional texts.
I welcome further inputs. Thanks.
September 24th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
Sorry I am not too sure why? Did you install the Microsoft IME for China under PRC? Make sure it is Chinese (PRC) and not Taiwan or Hong Kong
September 25th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
I have given up any further attempts to install the Chinese Handwriting Pad, and accept the Japanese one.
As I had indicated in an earlier post, I installed all Taiwan and PRC IMEs but with no success. I even removed all IMEs and reinstalled them, but again with no success.
This is simply a shot in the dark: Do you think that it is caused by the O/S? I have Vista Ultimate, 64-bit. Do you?