Need to look up a sinogram? Perhaps info about a sinogram? Dda has created an amazing tool called Tomabaem that is a must have for Mac users. What does it do?
What’s this program about?
This is a substitute for the System’s Character Palette - at least for people focusing on the so-called CJKV languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese). So pieces of software are cross-platform. Tomabaem, like Unicode, is cross-language. Whatever you are looking for related to Chinese characters, there’s a high chance that Tomabaem has a way of looking it up. Be it the Cantonese pronunciation, the UTF-16 codepoint, the radical (????), the meaning, or the character itself, which you can copy/paste or drag’n'drop from another document - a browser window, a word-processor - if the data is available in the Unicode Standard, version 4, you should be able to dig it out. We use the UniHan.txt file from the Unicode Consortium, partially re-indexed for speed, as the basis of the data shown.
But Tomabaem is also about adding and sharing your own knowledge:
- add missing data from the UniHan database (which is a living document, evolving every day), create new tags and data (why not adding entries for the Hokkien dialect, for instance, or references to the Ricci Institute’s Dictionary?);
- add compound words with definition. Your local copy of Tomabaem becomes a personalised dictionary of CJKV words.
- export lists of characters to various formats (XML, HTML…)
Read about its multitude of features over at the Tomabaem page. And if you like it, be sure to leave a tip in the jar.
46 Comments
…In fact, part of Texas belonged to La Territoire de la Louisianeall the more reason not to “mess wif them”!
As I mentioned to dda on oranckay’s blog, I’m happy to see that he has made his utility as inclusive as possible, by including not only Korean (sometimes missed by people studying Japanese Kanji) but also Vietnamese.
Monsieur dda’s page isn’t loading properly, however, unless he requires users to log in to view it. I won’t ask if he plans to port it to Windows, since he appears to be one of those nutty Mac afficionados….
Project description at Freshmeat
It’s very nice. Macs rule . . .
I won?€™t ask if he plans to port it to Windows, since he appears to be one of those nutty Mac afficionados?€?.
I have enough non-Mac software under my belt to be classified as agnostic (as long as you pay me to write it). When I decide what to code, it’s going to be on a Mac. I don’t know about nutty, but whatever.
Besides, making an exact replica of Tomabaem on Windope is excruciatingly hard to impossible. A Linux version could see the light if and when I can be convinced there would be potential users.
I opened the site. You can now see the pages [had forgotten to go from beta to launch mode... :-)]
This tool is the by-product of an IRC bot I developped for a channel I hang out with, where regulars speak at least three languages, among which one Asian language at least (and mostly 2 or three). One of the guys is a Texan Viet, so since I mess neither wif Texas nor wif our former colonies, I made sure to include Vietnamese
One of the guys is a Texan Viet, so since I mess neither wif Texas nor wif our former colonies, I made sure to include Vietnamese
LOL! Thanks for enabling the pages; I’ll check it out again as soon as I get a chance to do some serious exploring.
Macs do Korean very well thank you very much.
I did gazillion of Word, Excel, PPT (and later Keynote) files while in Korea, never had a problem.
Made brochures and advertisings, letterheads and mailings. Websites.
All on the Mac.
Plus, HWP is total crapware.
Make that “Le” Texas
Oh boy, the news that part of Texas was once French could be enough for one particularly famous Texan to reach for the freedom fries!
(Speaking of which, I gather fries are really Belgian, and not French at all….)
Oh boy, French America and fries: it’s making me crave some poutine!
poutine, aka all your coronary are belong to us…
It’s just about the best damn artery-clogging food out there!
I’m kind of curious as to why one would include Vietnamese? I was aware that language is fully romanized and doesn’t use Chinese characters at all.
Jing,
Short answer: chu-nom. Lots of Vietnamese texts written in æ¼???, either in Chinese or in Vietnamese. It may be not the liveliest field of study, but it is still taught and researched…
Vietnamese is also full of Chinese words. When you speak Korean AND know your æ¼???, it’s fascinating how many written words of Vietnamese you can guess correctly. They have kept the -p, -t, -k finals, and except for some oddities (?…… t/th, things like that), it’s really easier for a speaker of Korean, than say of Mandarin, to make accurate guesses.
I should defer to dda on this one, but they were used extensively prior to the 20th century, much as in Korea.
There is a web page here on Chu-nom, the Sino-Vietnamese script.
For what it’s worth, a lot of Vietnamese businesses in Vancouver, Canada, have Chinese characters on their signs, but that may be because a lot of their clientele are Chinese Vietnamese….
Sorry, dda, didn’t see your reply….
just for the heck of it, a few words, sans accents:
t?º¡p ch? ??œ?ªŒ
gi?¡m ?‘??‘c ??????
trung qu??‘c ?¸?œ?
etc etc
“…it?€™s really easier for a speaker of Korean, than say of Mandarin, to make accurate guesses.”
My personal observation is that Mandarin and Korean are fairly distant in their pronunciation of characters. Korean is, however, somewhat closer to Cantonese. The Cantonese pronunciation of ?¤??‰² (”gold colour”), for example, sounds very much like ?¸???‰ (unless I was completely misunderstanding the conversation…).
gam1 sik1, or so says Tomabaem Online…
Cantonese, Vietnamese and Korean have kept Middle-Chinese’s finals. The way the vowels evolved is however another story…
Darn it, your link is still not opening properly for me! I see the SNG/Sungnyemun.org (???1?™??œ???¶, if I recall correctly) and the left sidebar, but nothing in the body of the page. No luck when I click on the Tomabaem or Tomabaem Online links either.
I may have to switch to a Mac!
Would you be using Internet Exploder by any [lack of] chance?
I may have to switch to a Mac!
Mac mini makes it easy — from C$629.00. I bought one and love it.
dda:
Sad to say, yes. It’s not that I don’t know the alternatives: I was a loyal Netscape user who never used IE until just a couple of years ago, and I have tried Opera. But I’m stuck in my ways now….
Brendon:
Do you hail from the land of mounties and igloos? Or were you just converting to Canadian $ out of courtesy? I would not have considered buying a Mac before OS X came out (I am a UNIX/DOS command-line addict), but I may consider it now. Sooner or later, we’ll upgrade our computer, so I’ll see if I can surreptitiously plant the idea in my better half’s head of buying a Mac….
Okay, OS X came out a long time ago in IT terms, but then I was still using a manual typewriter in the early 90s….
Curious,
If you think you will be doing a lot of word processing in Korean over here in Korea, you might want to consider not getting a Mac until they come out with a new version of HWP (Hangul Word Processor by ??œ?¸€?³¼??´?“¨??°).
dda (#24), I wasn’t suggesting Macs can’t do Korean software. In fact, from long ago I have amazed Korean PC users by showing them how every Mac user can install Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, etc., on to their computer with the start-up disks.
What I said was that if Curious will be doing a lot of word processing in Korean over here in Korea then he might want to consider not getting a Mac until they come out with a new version of HWP.
You may consider it total crapware, and it does have its problems and idiosyncracies, but there are some benefits many Koreans feel about it (including ease of use due to famliarity) that make it THE de rigueur program among people who are doing word processing in Korean.
It’s the default word processor here, like it or not, and there will be some difficulties if you have a Mac that doesn’t run the latest version. I have a copy of the 1997 version on one of the Macs here in the office, and we brought in a brand-spaking new PC last year so that we would have no problem doing the LOADS and LOADS of stuff we have to do on HWP.
So automatic is the Korean use of HWP that producers or writers at our mom-and-pop network would send schedules and scripts out to the handful of foreigners who needed them in HWP. I had to drill into a bunch of people’s heads that most of the foreigners (2/3) didn’t have HWP on their home computers or wouldn’t know how to muddle their way through HWP on a workplace computer because they wrote little or no Korean, so they never used HWP.
I’m not bashing Macs. I love Macs. They are great for idiot users like me who don’t want to have to go through contortions to fix things, and they inspire such love among people like you who make wonderful things for people like me to use.
PCs suck.
What I said was that if Curious will be doing a lot of word processing in Korean over here in Korea then he might want to consider not getting a Mac until they come out with a new version of HWP. Not a problem. One simply installs some software called “Virtual PC” which runs a Windows-emulation on the mac, thus enabling one to run HWP on their Mac. One could always use the latest MS Office to generate Korean or Use Mariner Write for two-byte languages. I use both with few problems though I run HWP on a Windows box when it is needed.
Actually I think you can run the X11 version of HWP under XonX in OSX. Or you can always import it into Open Office.
Explain this to me like I’m a five-year-old…
When is version X11 (HWP2002, HWP2004, HWP2005?)?
And what is XonX?
Is this something that is going to be complicated? I ask because the good folks who run Apple Korea told me an OSX version of HWP should be released in the first half of this year.
How much success have you had with VirtualPC?
I haven’t used it for quite a while, but with cross-platform versions of virtually every vital program, I haven’t needed to use it.
X11 is Unix/Linux’s version of a GUI. It’s not the best system I’ve seen, but is better than Windows. Mac OS X is still way up there. Some programs originally written for Linux/Unix on i386 architecture can be recompiled for OS X/Darwin, but need to be run via X11. Fortunately, there are a versions of the X11 windows server available on OS X. I use Oroboros for as a an Aqua look as possible.
But I am not aware of a recompile of HWP/Linux (there’s this outfit who made clones of HWP, Word and Excel, esp for embedded) that would on the Mac…
Kushibo, R. Elgin, Brendon Carr, dda, et alia:
Thanks for all the advice. I have at least used a HWP viewer on a Windows machine, so I am somewhat familiar with it. For now, I’m able to use the Windows Korean IME in Word on an NT/2000/XP machine without any difficulty. Should I ever move to Korea and need something, I’ll consider all the possibilities. I did like Brendon’s recommendation. As long as I can open up a command line that has man pages, I’ll be happier than a pig in s***.
As long as I can open up a command line editor that has man pages….
(Totall OT, but for those who are wondering, man pages are the wonderful things that make UNIX actually useful. The writers of DOS command help pages (/?) are starting to get the idea, like for the SET command in 2000 and XP, but they’ve still got a long way to go.)
$ man woman
No manual entry for woman
$
True story
Oh, man! I haven’t seen that one before….
dda:
I still cannot open either the Tomabaem or Tomabaem Online page successfully. I have tried them in both Internet Explorer and Opera! I only see the sidebar. Interestingly, I can view the full page source, and when I download the page in IE, I see the unhelpful message in the status bar, “Done but with errors on page.”
Aidez-moi s’il-vous-plait!
“Aidez-moi” ???????³? “Aidez moi”: ????™€ ??¼??œ??¤!
This *is* curious…
This part of the site is made with Drupal, so it’s not like I went all the way to make it incompatible, like in some other places
Could you download Firefox and try with it?
I checked on my wife’s PeeCee, and lo and behold, it doesn’t work, I olnly see the sidebar… Grrr!
Well, third time lucky. I can view the pages in neither Internet Explorer nor Opera, but they do show up quite well in Firefox, and the character look-up is fully functional.
Hmmm, now I should see if , , , (o- and u-breve majuscule and minuscule) show up correctly in Blogger, in Firefox on a Windows 2000 machine, as they do not show up properly in IE under such a set-up…. (Although they do show up on non-Blogger blogs, and in Windows 98, oddly enough….)
Finally registered …
Thank you DDA.
I did gazillion of Word, Excel, PPT (and later Keynote) files while in Korea, never had a problem.
Made brochures and advertisings, letterheads and mailings. Websites.
In my experience MS Word: Mac is still an inferior ported version of MS Word for Windows, and is often very slow on the Macintosh; plus Korean/Hanja support/spellchecking is vastly inferior to that on the Windows version. There are still some cases where Korean word processing is going to be easier on the PC, though Koreans themselves seem to do fine using Macs for page layout.
JYC wrote:
In my experience MS Word: Mac is still an inferior ported version of MS Word for Windows, and is often very slow on the Macintosh;I would agree, but it was not always this way. Sometime back in the 1990s you had Word for Windows and Word for Mac as two separate applications, with two different numbering systems.
Around MS Word 6 (Macintosh) they tried to rework it to make it like the Windows version. Then in 1998 they actually started calling what would have been Word 7 “MS Word 98.”
The thing is that Word for Mac was superior to Word for Windows, but they basically lowered the next version of Word for Mac to make it like Word for Windows, and (I think) made the Mac version like an emulated Windows version.
It was PAINFULLY slow (it would take five minutes or so to load up) and Microsoft had to send version 6.1 for free to everyone because of the complaints.
Of course, this “oversight” seemed part of Microsoft’s strategy of reducing enthusiasm for Macs, by gutting and crapping all over the one good Mac program they made, which was also an essential Mac application.
The current edition of Office is much better, but it is still a humongous program, and the only program I still really have problems with on my Macs. I will thank Bill Gates for (finally) pushing the idea of cross-platform compatibility.
“Office successfully anally-raped a system which had never crashed,”
Interesting story, KrZ. And, uh, interesting imagery.
When people who have had very smooth-running systems (their Mac) end up having buttloads of trouble thanks to another system (Microsoft), is it really any wonder that some become fanatical about the whole Mac-versus-Windows debate?
It is MS’s predatory tactics, not their software, which have gotten them into the dominant position they’re in.
In my experience MS Word: Mac is still an inferior ported version of MS Word for Windows, and is often very slow on the Macintosh; plus Korean/Hanja support/spellchecking is vastly inferior to that on the Windows version. There are still some cases where Korean word processing is going to be easier on the PC, though Koreans themselves seem to do fine using Macs for page layout.
Correction: Office X is an inferior product, not the Mac itself, which is a superior platform… Apple never had a real Korean strategy, maybe it’ll change now that they’ve had a branch for a few years (whi remembers the evil Elex days?).
I don’t use much Word any more, as I don’t do much corporate crap any longer, and am a happy Office-less fella. Most of my writing in Korean is now done in emails, so all is fine
I remember the evil Elex days!
Things are better. They have a strategy; they have Apple Centers; they have service centers that actually give a rat’s ass (despite being an authorized Apple service center, they wouldn’t fix an Apple laser writer I had because Elex, as an Apple reseller, never actually sold that particular model of laser printer; “Take it back to the States and have it fixed,” I was told).
With Elex in charge, it’s a wonder anyone was using Macs back then.
I still use Word and Powerpoint. But I’m doing “corporate” stuff.
For me, the only thing that ever caused a kernel panic on OS X was the MS Office 2K4 installer. After the panic, instead of immediately booting up, the folder logo would flash for a few seconds before the system located the correct sector on the hard disk. I reinstalled the operating system, reset the PRAM, zeroed the hard-drive: nothing. MS Office successfully anally-raped a system which had never crashed, and which had only been rebooted when the occassional system patch came out.
For what it’s worth, I have nothing against non-Microsoft programs or operating systems. I experimented with Linux in the past and I use UNIX (partially) at work, but I guess I’m just too set in my ways to make the big switch from Windows, etc. to anything else.