Cantonese IM on Snow Leopard

Apple Mac OS X has built-in Chinese input methods, for both Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. However, there is one popular input method still not yet been built and supported officially by Apple; that’s the Cantonese input.

One of the reason why Apple hasn’t made it built-in on Mac OS might because the population of the Cantonese input method user group is still relatively small. Well, we know that most Cantonese-speaking people are from Hong Kong and GuangDong Province; yet most of the people in GuangDong don’t use Cantonese input at all; they mostly use Pin-Yin or Stroke input.

Good that someone made it possible on Mac. You can visit the official site for CantonIM for all the detail, if you can’t download from the input method, you can also download it here. (Note: I take no credit for this CantonIM plugin; I am just putting it here for alternate download source and I will remove it base on author’s request.) I hereby give special thanks to the author who made a great contribution to Chinese Mac user community; it’s very helpful especially for those who use Cantonese Input as their most familiar input.

I have a friend who is still not upgrading his Leopard to Snow Leopard because he uses Cantonese input every day and if CantonIM doesn’t work on Snow Leopard, he will need to use Windows again which he is no willing to do so. So I did a test on my Snow Leopard-installed Macbook; even it doesn’t work, it matters no much to me since I don’t know Cantonese input at all.

The installation is the same as on Leopard. What you need to do is download the .dmg file, extract it and copy the Canton08.inputplugin to path “/Users/YOUR USER NAME/Library/Input Methods/” folder. Then restart your Mac OS and check your CantonIM under “System Preference-> Language and Text -> Input source”.

If it doesn’t work, there is a readme file in the .dmg file, you can check it and trouble shoot yourself. Or you can try contact the author or maybe I can help you out too.

Good luck with your Cantonese input and happy Chinese typing with the input method you are most familiar with; and now on Mac too.

Another thing I found it’s interesting that, from the same plugin, the icon is different on Leopard and on Snow Leopard. Let’s take a look:

(First one is on Leopard and the second one is on Snow Leopard)