[KS] Getting Hanja in Mac IME

[Don Baker]

Frank's correct--I meant to send my earlier message to the bulletin board, not just to Frank. 
I want to thank Frank for mentioning the Hanazono fonts. I had forgotten that I have them on my Mac as well. 
I also want to join Frank in his praise of the Unicode Checker. I access it through the services menu on my Mac. When I see a character I don't recognize on my computer, I select that character, go to the services menu, and ask my Mac to "display character information."  The Unicode Checker program then opens up and gives me all sorts of information about that character, including where to find it in Matthews and in Morohashi.  (For those who haven't discovered this apple gift to Mac users, you can go to the keyboard system preference panel, click "keyboard shortcuts," go to "services," and scroll down to "text" and then to "display character information." Once you have checked "display character information," you will find that shortcut to identifying characters available in your browsers and word processing programs.)  It has saved me a lot of time when I have come across a character with a difficult to identity radical.  

Don Baker ProfessorDepartment of Asian Studies University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Z2 don.baker at ubc.ca

> Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2012 10:44:44 -0700
> From: hoffmann at koreaweb.ws
> To: koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws
> Subject: Re: [KS] Getting Hanja in Mac IME
> 
> 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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