Pinyin Character entry on a touchscreen keyboard
- by mmr
The app I'm developing requires that it be deployed in China, which means that it needs to have Pinyin and Chinese character handling. I'm told that the way that our customers handle character entry is like so:
Enter in the pinyin character, like 'zhang'
As they enter the characters, a list of possible Chinese (Mandarin?) characters are presented to the user, like:
The user will then select '1' to enter the family name that is roughly translated to 'zhang'
How can I hook such programs (I believe one is called 'mspy.exe', from Microsoft, which I'm lead to believe comes with Microsoft versions of XP) into a WPF text box? Right now, the user can enter text either by using their keyboard or by using an on-screen keyboard, so I will probably need to capture the event of a keypress from either source and feed it to some OS event or to MSPY.exe or some similar program.
Or is there some other way to enter pinyin and have it converted to Mandarin? Is there a program other than MSPY I should look at?
EDIT: For those of you who think that this should 'just work', it does not. Chinese character entry will work just fine if entering text into notepad or the start-run menu or whatever, but it will not work in WPF. That's the key to this question: how do I enable WPF entry? There's the Google Pinyin and Sogou pinyin, but the websites are in Mandarin or Chinese or something similar and I don't read the language.
