Japanese Input The Way You Meant It - Google Japanese Input (Google 日本語入力)
12/03/2009
Posted by
Kudo Taku / Software Engineer
Komatsu Hiroyuki / Software Engineer
Oikawa Takuya / Senior Engineering Manager

Today, Google Japanese Input (beta) was released.

Google Japanese Input, available for Windows (32 bit only) as well as Mac, is a Japanese text input software program (input method). Through a wealth of vocabulary combined with a powerful suggest feature, it supports Japanese input the way you meant it.

Google Japanese Input possesses a powerful vocabulary in a league of its own. From the web mechanically and automatically a dictionary is created recording terms not possible to cover by hand such as modern language, specialty and technical terms, celebrity names, etc. In order to realize high conversion precision, large quantities of data gathered from the web are used to construct a statistical language model and generate a conversion engine. You might call it an input method reflective of the modern day Web (the creation of this dictionary and statistical language model make use of Google's large scale distributed processing system "Map Reduce", comprised of computers scaled in the thousands). Furthermore the powerful suggest feature's massive vocabulary can be accessed entering a small number of input keys.

Google Japanese Input was originally started by Google engineers Kudo and Komatsu during their 20% project time. As many of you know, Google's 20% rule states that 20% of employee working hours can be spent working on personal projects.

At that time, Kudo was in charge of Google's "did you mean" feature. The team was developing a "did you mean" system that was highly accurately correcting a large number of spelling mistakes caused by input method misconversion, convincing them that Google Japanese Input was not only possible, but happening right before their eyes.

At that same time Komatsu, an author of open source Japanese input system software, was working on another team. He had joined Google in hopes of developing input methods and was warming to the idea of using the web's massive amount of data combined with Google's suggest feature to provide an input method only possible at Google.

It was in this way that Kudo and Komatsu started the project. Initially it was just the two of them but gradually others started contributing in various forms as part of their 20% project time. Among them were engineers who had participated in the development of various Japanese input and text processing systems such as Anthy, WinAnthy, scim-skk, skkime, AjaxIME, PRIME and MeCab as well as an engineer who had development experience with Windows TSF and engineers with various operating system development experience. Google Japanese Input is the result of the combined know-how and collaboration of these natural language processing and platform system developers.

Google Japanese Input is still in beta with many features yet to be implemented. You may experience application compatibility issues and misconversions. Many improvements remain to be made. We look forward to your bug reports and feedback.

＜Postscript＞
We had a lot of inquiries so we are adding this postscript.

• Google Japanese Input is not connected to the network. It operates offline.
• The property "Secret Mode" allows you to temporarily turn off suggestions based on auto learning, input history and user dictionaries.
• We are currently working very hard on a Windows 64 bit version.

For more information about Google Japanese Input, please refer to the help center. There is also a help forum available.

9:53 AM

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Labels: Engineering, IME, Japanese Input

1. Click Edit > CSS

2. Add Meiryo (or the font of your choice) as the default paragraph font:

3. Highlight the text you would like to display as Meiryo and click "Normal Paragraph Text":

That is all you need to do. Once the default paragraph font is Meiryo, your document text will adopt it. You won't need to keep highlighting text and changing it to the normal paragraph font as once it is set, it stays that way until you change it to something else. You can also freely adjust the font size and the style will be maintained. Since Meiryo is a Microsoft Windows font, these instructions are specific to Windows but I'm sure they apply to Mac OS and Linux as well. You would just need to indicate the appropriate font in step two. Below are before and after shots of a sample document I created to show what a difference a nice Japanese font makes in Google Docs.

Before Customizing The Style Sheet:

After Customizing The Style Sheet:

I hope you've found this tip helpful. Thanks for reading.

With Windows Vista, Microsoft has introduced a new default Japanese font that supports ClearType.  It is called "Meiryo" or「メイリオ」if you are using a Japanese locale.  For Windows XP users, Meiryo is availabe as a download.  I was using Vista while browsing the university web site so I had the Meiryo font on my system but I wasn't aware of it.  Using the Firefox plugin "Firebug" I examined the CSS stylesheet and saw the font style reference to Meiryo.  I checked my fonts folder (C:\windows\fonts by default) and sure enough, there it was!  Woohoo, why didn't I notice this before?  I launched Microsoft Word and entered in some Japanese and changed the font to Meiryo and sure enough, it looked just like the university web site's font.  Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I am going to show you two screen shots taken from the home page of Yahoo Japan.  One is using Meiryo and the other is not.  The content is exactly the same.

With Meiryo:

Without Meiryo:

As you can probably see, the Meiryo font makes the text look much, much better.  This difference really shines when you are using applications that have a lot of small detailed text such as Yahoo calendar, etc.   Hopefully companies such as Yahoo will update their stylesheets to include Meiryo soon.  Until that time, you can tweak your Firefox settings and also use the add-on "Stylish" to override the font.  Here is how:

1. Use the latest version of Firefox browser if you are not already.

2. If you are using Windows XP, use the link above to download the Meiryo font from Microsoft.  If you are using Vista, you are all set.

3. Install the "Stylish" Add-on to Firefox. (Follow this link and then click "Add to Firefox" for the Stylish Add-on by author np)

4. To take care of many web sites, you can set Meiryo as the default Firefox font. (Tools -> Options -> Content.  Under "Fonts & Colors" select Meiryo as the default font.  I have the size set to 16.  Next click "Advanced" and use the dropdown to make it say "Fonts for Japanese".  For proportional, I have "Sans Serif" selected with size 16.  For both Serif and Sans-serif I have Meiryo selected.  For Monospace, I have MS Gothic with Size 16 selected.)  Make sure you check the checkbox "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above" or you will mess up a lot of web sites.  This only fixes sites that don't have a font specified in a stylesheet.

5. Since sites like Yahoo Japan specify fonts in their stylesheet (that don't currently include Meiryo), you can override them with Stylish.  Surf to Yahoo Japan and then in your Firefox toolbar, click Tools -> Add-ons. Click "Extensions". Find "Stylish" and click "Options". Now, setting up Stylish can be pretty tricky. Check the home page for specifics but here is a sample rule to get you up and running with Meiryo for Yahoo Japan. Click "Write". Click Insert -> Site Rules. Choose "In Domain" and type in yahoo.co.jp in the text box (leave off www). Click Add. Then click "OK". It should look like this:

The site rule you created will add this to the text box area:

@-moz-document domain(yahoo.co.jp) {

}

Between those lines, add this:

body,textarea,td,input {
font-family: "Meiryo" !important;
}
#wrapper {
font-family: "Meiryo" !important;
}

After these steps, it should look something like this:

6. Click "Save" and you should be all set.  Yahoo Japan should now be displaying with the Meiryo font.

Occasionally you will find sections of text that are wrapped with a special tag that revert back to another font.  If you use the Firefox plugin "Firebug", you can right-click on the text in question and choose "Inspect Element".  With that, you can usually find the style tag surrounding the text and add it to your Stylish rule.  Also, you can use the Yahoo Japan rule as a template to create similar rules for other web sites.

Hopefully this article has given you some ideas about how you can use the Meiryo font in Microsoft Windows.  Please leave comments if you have given it a try to let me know how it goes.  I'm hoping to add more screen shots of "with" and "without" web pages.  One I'm really amazed with is ThinkIT (www.thinkit.co.jp).  It looks so much better with Meiryo!

I was pretty excited to try this.  In the old days I used to run a copy of Japanese Windows 98 which I had purchased while living in Sapporo.  I thought it was neat to see the "Start" menu displayed as スタート and have access to all of the other Japanese versions of things.  At the time I didn't have much of a need to run Japanese software but I still had a good time experimenting with it.  Ultimately I would end up reverting back to English and have to reinstall my entire OS.  That is not a very convenient way to manage your operating system.  With Windows Vista Ultimate, they have made things very easy.  In my case, I purchased an OEM copy of US English 32 bit Vista Ultimate from a local PC retailer called Microcenter.  I purchased it for $149 which I thought was very reasonable.  (If you don't live near a Microcenter, you can buy the OEM version from NewEgg or other similar web sites for about the same cost.  Note that OEM versions are usually reserved for system builders and do not come with any kind of support).  Once the installation is complete, you simply go into the Windows Update tool and under optional components, choose Japanese, click "Update" and then wait.  Be prepared to wait awhile as the update can take 30-45 minutes or more.  Also, you should not run other applications while it is updating.  After the update is complete, go into the Control Panel and select Regional and Language Options and then choose Keyboards and Languages.  You will see a "Choose a display language" drop-down under which you should see 日本語.  Select it and click OK.  After that you reboot your computer and you are good to go. 

A good way to test that everything is working is to download and install some Japanese software.  I tested my install with the Japanese version of Yahoo Messenger, Toolbar and Widgets.  Initially I had not set my locale to Japanese so the install dialog showed garbled characters (文字化け).  After changing the locale however, everything looked great.  I really felt like I was using a native copy of Japanese Windows Vista.

I did run into one "gotcha".  Initially when I installed Vista I ran all the Windows critical updates prior to the Japanese language pack update.  There were about 50 or them that I had to install.  After those finished I tried to install the language pack but I received a "Code 2 Error".  Apparently this is pretty common and Microsoft has a knowledge base article dealing with it and a patch you can download to correct it.  I tried the patch but it did not work for me.  I ran the Japanese language update at least 4-5 times but each time it failed.  In the end, I did a fresh install of Vista and ran the Japanese language pack update FIRST.  This worked.  After that I ran all of the other updates and everything continued to work fine.

I took a few screen shots of this process which you can view by clicking here.  At the time of this writing, I have been running Vista in Japanese mode for about a week and so far everything is going great.