Re: Chinese PinYin Characters

From: Thomas Chan (thomas@atlas.datexx.com)
Date: Wed Oct 17 2001 - 10:16:18 EDT


On Wed, 17 Oct 2001, [iso-8859-1] Manoël Bailly wrote:

> Could someone tell me if all accentuated characters used for pinyin
> writing is include in Unicode ?

As precomposed characters, most of them are included. You have:
1a) LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS
    LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS
1b) all combinations of LATIN {CAPITAL,SMALL} LETTER {A,E,I,O,U,U WITH
    DIAERESIS} AND {MACRON,ACUTE,CARON,GRAVE)

You might also need a few more characters (mostly for some interjections):
2a) LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH CIRCUMFLEX
    LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH CIRCUMFLEX)
2b) all combinations of LATIN {CAPITAL,SMALL} LETTER E WITH CIRCUMFLEX
    AND {MACRON,ACUTE,CARON,GRAVE). However, there aren't any precomposed
    versions of:
      *LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH CIRCUMFLEX AND MACRON
      *LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH CIRCUMFLEX AND CARON
      *LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH CIRCUMFLEX AND MACRON
      *LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH CIRCUMFLEX AND CARON
3) all combinations of LATIN {CAPITAL,SMALL} LETTER M WITH {ACUTE,GRAVE}.
    However, there aren't any precomposed versions of:
      *LATIN CAPITAL LETTER M WITH GRAVE
      *LATIN SMALL LETTER M WITH GRAVE
4) all combinations of LATIN {CAPITAL,SMALL} LETTER N WITH {ACUTE,CARON,
    GRAVE} for constructing "ng" syllables.

(You can use decomposed versions for what's missing.)

> I wish to insert pinyin characters into a word document. Does someone
> know how to do it ? It seems that with IME I cannot.

I usually type Pinyin using the "Dai4 Diao4 Pinyin" input method of NJStar
Communicator (http://www.njstar.com/), which allows telex-style input,
e.g., "zhong1" is converted to <zhong> with an macron over the <o>. I
don't think it supports entry of the second set of less common characters
I described above.

Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Wed Oct 17 2001 - 11:06:28 EDT