To begin using one of the Chinese Language Kits on the Macintosh, open up an application. For this example, Microsoft Word 2001 will be used. Once your document is open and you are ready to type, go to the upper right hand corner of the screen and look for either a flag or a country symbol. Click and hold on this symbol and the following menu should appear. Click on the appropriate Language Kit icon you wish to use.

Simplified Chinese	Traditional Chinese

Once your language kit has been selected, you will see a pencil icon next to the language kit icon. To help you familiarize yourself with these menus, the english equilavents of each menu are shown. These are the menu selections for Simplified Chinese Character Entry:

And these are the menu selections for Traditional Chinese Character Entry:

Two items on these menus are of particular usefulness. The Operation Palette (upper graphic) sums up the Pencil menu in one floating box and contains most of the commands you see above. The Character Table (lower graphic) also helps you in locating characters that might not "pop up" right away as you are typing.

For most character input needs, you can use the phonetic "ABC STANDARD" for Simplified Chinese or "PINYIN" for Traditional Chinese character entry.

Other input methods will require different ways of typing in order to get the characters you want in. An example is Big5 encoding, where you enter in the hexadecimal value of the Chinese character in order for it to appear.

For the next few examples, the "ABC Standard" will be used.

Either in the Operating Pallette or the Pencil Menu, select the "ABC Standard" for your character input method. In this graphic, the input method is the third item on the list shown.

In this example, the sound "shu" was wanted, so the keys "S, H, and U" were typed. Notice the underline as the letters were entered.

By pressing the space bar, a set of characters pops up. You can choose the correct character by clicking on that character with your mouse or by typing the appropriate number on your keyboard.

Notice that there is an arrow at the far right of the selection pallette. This means that there are more characters to choose from. In this case, we wanted the first character, and the first character in the menu appears below where "shu" used to be.

To accept the character, press the "Return" or "enter" key and go on to your next phoneme. The underline will disappear and you may continue to type.

In this example, the Traditional Chinese Language Kit is being used and Pinyin is selected as the preferred input method. Like the Simplified Chinese "ABC Standard," the characters "h" and "u" were typed, an underline appeared, the space bar was pressed, and the character table appeared. This time we expanded the table to show all possible characters for the phoneme "hu."

Finally, once your document is completed, you can save and print it like any other document. All Chinese characters will be retained in the document.