“Web-based Chinese Input Service (WebIME)
is a webpage that enables users to input Chinese characters on Internet
anytime, anywhere. It provides five conventional Chinese input methods
(Cangjie (倉頡), simplified Cangjie(簡易), Hanyu pinyin(漢語拼音), Cantonese
Pronunciation(粵語拼音)[#1] and Chinese dictionary-like method
(Radical/Number of Strokes(部首/筆劃))) augmented with two special
features, homophone and candidate characters filtering. WebIME aims to
bring more ease and convenience for users to input Chinese characters
when surfing the Internet.
Web based Chinese Input service has two modes:
- It is suitable for inputting Chinese characters to
applications that have been designed for accepting characters coded in
ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000 and HKSCS-2001
(for example: input from Windows XP/2000 platforms)
- In this compatibility mode, HKSCS characters coded in the
Private Use Area (E000-F8FF) are shown in blue:
- It is suitable for inputting Chinese characters to
applications that are able to accept the newly implemented code ranges
(20000-2FFFF) in the ISO/IEC 10646:2003 (for example: input from
Windows Vista and Mac OS X 10.4 platforms)
- In this default mode, characters coded in 20000-2FFFF are shown
in red:
The major differences between the 2 modes are:
- HKSCS characters coded in the E000-F8FF are shown in blue in the compatibility mode while most of
them are assigned to 20000-2FFFF and shown in red
in the default mode.
- Most characters marked in black (4E00-9FFF) and green (3400-4DFF) are the same in the two
modes.
- The
default mode includes 191 more characters than compatibility mode. They
are newly included characters since the publication of HKSCS-2001
Demonstrations of the basic usages and features of the WebIME
If it is uncertain whether an application can accept characters coded
in 20000-2FFFF, a user could try the compatibility mode.
Hardware requirements
- Screen resolution of 1,024x768 pixels
- PC with 1G Byte memory
Browser requirements
- Firefox 3.0 and IE7/8 are preferred
Font requirements
- Some characters may be displayed as a square, "?" or blank
if the platform has not installed a font including those characters,
most of them are the newly included characters in HKSCS or ISO 10646.
Example 1:To input a character (224CC)
included since the publication of HKSCS-2004
Since Microsoft’s HKSCS-2001 addon on Windows 2000/XP does not include
this character, it is shown as a square by Firefox 3.0.10
It is shown as a "?" by Firefox 2.0.0.20
It is shown as blank by IE 7.0
Since Windows Vista’s bundled font
includes many Chinese characters newly included in the ISO/IEC
10646:2003, this character is properly displayed.
Example 2:To view a character coded in
E000-F8FF using Firefox 3.0.10 on Mac OS X 10.4
Before font configuration
After font configuration
More details on the font configuration of
Firefox to view the characters in the Private Use Area in the
compatibility mode are shown this document (
pdf format, 400KB ).
WebIME Download Area
(for web administrator’s reference)
** Users of the WebIME do NOT need to install
the WebIME. User should browse the
http://www.ccli.gov.hk/webime-e.html
where they can input Chinese characters.
If
web administrators would like to modify or install the WebIME on their
own web servers, please download the following cim-download.zip, and
read the Installation Instruction.
(Please right-click and save the file to your computer)
The cim-download.zip contains the following files:
- Installation Instruction (instruction.pdf, 177KBytes)
- WebIME files (cim.zip, 10.5MBytes)
- Source of the WebIME (cim-source.zip, 1.5MBytes)