Typing Pinyin on Windows Part ]|[ - Capital Letter Tones

   2007-10-19  

One of my Chinese teachers is using my windows pinyin keyboard layout, and stumbled upon a problem. It seem that sometimes capital letters need tone marks too. For example, country names. Éguo (俄国, Russia) for example. It is rare in practice, but comes up quite often for teachers doing geography lessons.

I did a quick update to the layout to allow tone marks on capital letters. I’ve also heard reports that ctrl+alt+u doesn’t always create a u. I added ctrl+alt+v in addition to ctrl+alt+u to hopefully solve that problem. Both will now create a u. (I have only heard of 2 people having that issue)

You can download the new layout, and if you are into tweaking stuff, you can also download the source file (requires Microsoft’s Keyboard Layout Creator ).

To install the layout, watch the movie from the original post the steps are the same, but the name is now US Pinyin 2 not US Pinyin (Custom).

Also, if you watch to the end of that movie it explains how to remove the old layout. The old layout wont be needed it you update to this one and you can remove it if you’d like.

Update 2008年6月20日: For people having problems with typing ü, I have gotten a report that it only works when “using the ctrl from the left of the space bar and the alt key from the right of the spacebar” on a Dell Latitude notebook.

I have had a few emails from people asking what license this is under and / or if they can redistribute it to their friends / classmates / students. All are fine with me, I consider this to be in the public domain.

Update 2010年1月17日: John Budding has compiled an updated version for Windows 7 64 bit. I have not tested or run this version (since I don’t have windows 7), but he says it works well for him. I make no guarantee, and can not support the install. So, I guess, use at your own risk.