Traditional Chinese
- Translation of OLPC webpage in Traditional Chinese
Free Chinese Font
Firefly bitmap fonts (best for low-resolution disp.) covers both Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese
Also, a font company, Arphic(文鼎), donated two fonts containing both traditional and simplified Chinese. Mr. Firefly (螢火飛) combines these two fonts, converted into unicode base and embeded bitmap font (新宋體). It's now widedly used in Chinese Linux community. Another font project, wen-quan-yi (文泉驛), is also based on firefly font.
Input Methods
Several hundred input methods for Chinese have been developed. Among the most popular for Traditional Chinese are Cangjie and Zhuyin-Hanzi conversion.
- CANG-JIE input method (Cangjie Method 倉頡)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 手 田 水 口 廿 卜 山 戈 人 心 日 尸 木 火 土 竹 十 大 中 片 重 難 金 女 月 弓 一 , . /
- Phonetic input method (Zhuyin 注音)
ㄅ ㄉ ˇ ˋ ㄓ ˊ ˙ ㄚ ㄞ ㄢ ㄦ = ㄆ ㄊ ㄍ ㄐ ㄔ ㄗ ㄧ ㄛ ㄟ ㄣ [ ㄇ ㄋ ㄎ ㄑ ㄕ ㄘ ㄨ ㄜ ㄠ ㄤ ; ㄈ ㄌ ㄏ ㄒ ㄖ ㄙ ㄩ ㄝ ㄡ ㄥ
Cangjie is shape-based. It uses twenty-four familiar characters, each of which stands for a set of related shapes. All but a few Chinese characters can be readily broken up into pieces within that relatively small set of shapes. From that sequence of shapes, no more than five will be selected, by regular rules, to form the code for typing the character. For example, the character 明 is broken into 日 and 月. For the few characters that are too complex for this process, there is a system of three-element abbreviations, each including the character 難 (difficult). There are numerous books in Chinese on Cangjie, but little information in English.
Zhuyin, also called Bopomofo from its first four letters, is a Chinese alphabet made of greatly simplified character forms. It is used in elementary school textbooks in Chinese-speaking countries, in dictionaries, and in IMEs for Traditional Chinese. The corresponding phonetic input method for Simplified Chinese uses Pinyin Romanization.
Input Method Editor engines for Traditional Chinese Linux all support Cangjie, Pinyin, and Zhuyin. Engines for Simplified Chinese all support Pinyin and Wubi, a different shape-based IME. Chinese IME software for Linux includes IIIMF, scim, xcin, chinput, and methods built into the Yudit and emacs editors.