Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Simplified and Traditional Chinese in Safari

This might be pretty obvious to some, but I just realized that Safari (for Mac) will automatically convert Simplified Chinese to Traditional and vice versa. Just highlight the text to be converted, go to Safari->Services->ChineseTextConverter, and choose the Chinese flavor of your choice.

I have been a die-hard Firefox user for a long time but Safari does seem to handle Chinese and Japanese better. I'm one step closer to switching.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

With a MAC -- which I presume you are using -- you can switch between sets anywhere: select the pull-down where language inputs and the character palette can be accessed (located at the top-right corner of your screen; an US flag represents English), select the traditional set, and at the end of the list of languages -- in the same pull-down menu -- will be a number of options, one of which will allow you to convert simplified characters into traditional ones. To convert trad. to simp. you may need to select the simpl. character set initially, opposed to the trad. set. And, of course, highlight the characters you would like to convert before initiating the transformation. .

amida said...

Thanks--I never really paid attention to those options in the input menu. I can't get this method to convert simplified to traditional in Firefox, though.

Anonymous said...

I've just found out about an extension for Firefox known as Tong-Wen that interconverts between Simplified/Traditional Chinese. The one on Mozilla is outdated, but I think the original author is maintaining it at: http://rt.openfoundry.org/Foundry/Project/Download/?Queue=333

I'm currently using tongwen_0.3.8.8.xpi with the latest Firefox 2.0.0.9 and it works brilliantly! :)

Kind Regards
Mosey

amida said...

I'll check it out--thanks!