[KS] Getting Hanja in Mac IME

Frank Hoffmann hoffmann at koreaweb.ws
Wed Aug 29 13:44:44 EDT 2012


Hi again:

Don Baker's advise is a good one. 
(I believe Prof. Baker's reply was accidentally only sent to me? See 
end of this message for his note.) 

Indeed, 'PopChar' will do the job just fine, given we likely don't have 
to input missing characters as we would when just writing a standard 
text.

But we can beat those 70,000 characters ):::

Another alternative (TrueType, works fine for Mac and Windows):
Hanazono fonts--these presently include 85,563 characters, of which 
75,619 are hanja/kanji.
This is a free font, an ongoing open source project:
http://en.glyphwiki.org/wiki/GlyphWiki:MainPage

Home page:
http://fonts.jp/hanazono/
Download link for the font:
http://sourceforge.jp/projects/hanazono-font/releases/
--> click on the .zip file (presently: "hanazono-20120421.zip")
Put it in some folder and unzip -- creates 6 files, two of which are 
the fonts:
 HanaMinA.ttf
 HanaMinB.ttf
The README.txt file has all the explanations.

That font also includes all the other regular Unicode characters (like 
Han'gŭl and Hiragana, etc.).

While 'PopChar' is a wonderful little tool, you can also use the free 
'UnicodeChecker' tool (http://earthlingsoft.net/UnicodeChecker/) to do 
the same. But 'PopChar' has the advantage that it always runs when your 
Mac is on.

Note: I still remember very well when we had the first 'HWP' program at 
the university, that was in 1986. And none of us students understood 
why the Korean programmers would possibly limit Hanja to under 5,000 
characters (then already the same set as today). It made no sense then 
and makes no sense today. Chinese software included at the time already 
around 10,000 or more characters, and in 1999 and 2000 there was a 
chance for the Korean government to correct this strange limitation 
with the Unicode Commission, but that never happened. Whatever is being 
taught in high schools in one thing, but limiting the number of Hanja 
in a font is a completely different one--seems not to make any 
practical sense. The result is expensive! Lots of work-around solutions 
and little hacks. Such real life implementations of ideologies always 
cost time and money, lots of both. 

Last note: A 'hack' around this limitation (on a Mac) would be to 
create a customized input table (e.g. editing the tables that 
"2-Set-Korean" accesses, and expand those (from under 5,000 to maybe 
12,000). That is certainly possible. Problem is, I can't think of an 
automated way of doing this. It would take an awfully long time--and 
all that to "overwrite" some Korean government decision. 


Best,
Frank

----------- Don Baker's note -----------

On Wed, 29 Aug 2012 08:30:54 -0700, Don Baker wrote:
> If you need a really obscure character, you can download the Han Nom 
> font at http://vietunicode.sourceforge.net/fonts/fonts_hannom.html
> That font was created for Vietnamese but it has around 70,000 
> different  characters (27,000 in Han Nom A and over 42,000 in Han Nom 
> B).
> 
> I have found the best way to input an obscure character into a text 
> is to use the Pop Char program. That way I don't have to worry about 
> the Chinese pronunciation. If I know the radical and the stroke 
> count, I can find the character in Pop Char and click on it to insert 
> it in my document.  
> 
> Don Baker 
> Professor
> Department of Asian Studies 
> University of British Columbia 
> Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Z2 
> don.baker at ubc.ca




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