Comments on: Who in the heck uses half-width alphanumeric input?

By: MGrant

MGrant — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 08:55:56 +0000

Oh, MAN!!! Using Caps Lock to switch to/from half-width alphanumeric!!
Thank you for this!!! This issue has been a thorn in my side for years!!!
I never knew…

Tenga-san, thank you(over two years after your post, but thanks are well-deserved)!

And Ryan, thank YOU for this blog!! I just found it today and have been catching up
on all the posts.

By: KTV Girl

KTV Girl — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 17:17:19 +0000

We have the similar problems with IME in Mandarin Chinese. As beautiful as Asian languages are, they are simply not practical.

By: Ryan Ginstrom

Ryan Ginstrom — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 04:48:01 +0000

Nice one, Philip

Since we’re swapping character conversion tricks:

F6: Convert to Hiragana
F7: Convert to Katakana
F8: Convert to Half-width Katakana
F9: Convert to Full-width Romaji
F10: Convert to Half-width Romaji

This works for all the modes. For example, when in Hiragana input mode, you can press F7 to quickly enter a Katakana word.

By: Philip

Philip — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 04:30:28 +0000

Karla;

Just pressing F10 works as well. Press it again and the word becomes all caps. Press it third time only the first letter is in caps.

By: Karla

Karla — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 10:45:20 +0000

I totally agree about the half-width alphanumeric… yargh!

I found this trick by accident–if you want to add an English word into the middle of Japanese make sure you’re starting a new string and type the word normally. It’ll look awful–”have” turns into 「はヴぇ」, for example. But instead of confirming the string with enter or space bar hit ctrl+t instead. It’s not the most elegant solution and I have no idea why it works, but there you go. ^_^

By: Ryan Ginstrom

Ryan Ginstrom — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 07:01:35 +0000

The caps lock also works for IME, and nicely sidesteps the initial capital problem. But I think it would still be better to have caps lock drop down to direct input, then pressing caps lock again return to hiragana/katakana input. This is the same number of keystrokes (replacing an Enter key press with a Caps Lock key press), but gives the benefits of direct input, like auto correct, auto completion, look-ahead searching, easier drag and drop of text, and so on.

By: Wataru Tenga

Wataru Tenga — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 06:02:10 +0000

ATOK has this “feature” as well, but I think I can see the wisdom of it in this case. It is useful for people writing in Japanese as their native language who want to insert an occasional English word of phrase, and who are served by the special features such as predictive entry and spell checking. The mode is triggered by hitting the Caps Lock key, so there’s no need to capitalize.
I’m typing in this mode now in ATOK, and as I type, various suggestions come up in a pop-up window. It’s not really hard to use, and I can type a whole sentence without having to hit Enter until the very end.