entering chinese characters

[overrider]

hello all,

to get the chinese character based language in the computer (on a screen) there are two main ways of putting it in. one way is called pinyin, which is basically the romanized versin of chinese words. the word good means "hao" and uses a slight descend in voice tone while spoken, so it is appended the number 3. hao3 is the pinyin character for good. the other input method is wubi typing system, which enables the user a very fast input of characters, and is standard for todays chinese computer users. now when i open a word document, change my input method to chinese typing, choose pinyin, and type "hao" followed by a space character, the character for good appears on the screen. but if i do this in filemaker7, just type "hao" followed by a space into a simple textfield, it only gives a rectangle instead of giving me a character. i must type "hao" followed by two space characters before the character appears correctly. this seems to be a problem with filemaker recognising chinese characters. on osx you can easy try this for yourself, just go to system preferences --> international --> input menu and choose the tickmark for simplified chinese. then notice a little flag appearing in the top right corner of your screen. clicking on the flag enables you to change between english and chinese input. that chinese typing sill doesnt work correctly in filemaker7 is really annoying as i need it desperatly to work the normal way for our companys solution.

[BobWeaver]

?

Works okay for me. I typed hao and one space.

Mac Powerbook G4

OSX 10.3.5

Filemaker Pro 7.0v3

However I noticed that the following options will have some effect on input behavior:

-Indexing language in the field options

-Default font for input type (under fonts tab in filemaker preferences)

After messing around with these, I did encounter the problem you mentioned.

I used the Fang Song font for all options as well as setting the field font to fang song in layout mode.

[overrider]

when i make the field using fang song as a font, it works, youre right. type hao and one space. but now make another field with a standard font and type hao and two spaces. the latter field character looks much nicer, somehow more sharp and stronger. strange that when in fang song i need one space, and in other fields i need two spaces. if anything but fanbg song is incompatible it wouldnt show the character at all i think, so the problem seems to be in the way filemaker syncs the field with the font only after the character is actually written; i think the first space is more for choosing the character and then continuing typing.

another problem with fang song fields. try make a normal layout with fields for name_en and name_cn next to each other, both 15 px high and 11 pt font size. now change the font for name_cn to fang song and see how the field jumped to 17 px width. now chage the size of the field back to 15, and see how in browse mode on entering the field with the cursor its resizing ugly to 17 px again. igitt... and i didnt even try yet how it loooks on windows when using fang song. in filemaker 6 it needed an ugly registry hack mapping songti / fang song to beijing to have it display correctly on all platforms.

test.fp7.zip

[BobWeaver]

It is strange that the keyboard entry behavior is different with different fonts which should belong to the same language.

Field sizes will occasionally change when changing fonts due to different font metrics. So, that is not unusual.