English input
The Input dialog (shown in Figure 3 below) is displayed whenever Japanese character entry
is possible in a target window (eg. when a wordprocessor document is open),
and disappears automatically when normal English and extended European
characters are expected. To enter normal English characters, simply type
on the keyboard as usual. To enter extended European characters, press
the Euro button (shown in Figure 1).
Figure 1
The Euro button
Pressing the Euro button will bring up a table which shows all the characters which can be entered into any of the English textboxes. This table is shown in Figure 2 below.
Figure 2
The extended European character table
Japanese input
The Input dialog contains three main sections:
Direct input mode
The buttons on the top left of the Input dialog (shown in Figure
3) support the direct input of Hiragana, Katakana, wide-roman and narrow-roman
characters respectively. When any of these buttons are selected, you can
type on the keyboard and your keystrokes are converted dynamically into
their respective characters.
Figure 3
The Input dialog
When Hiragana and Katakana modes are selected, it usually requires multiple
keystrokes to enter a single Kana character, and keystroke combinations
for the Hiragana and Katakana character sets are identical. The keystroke
conversion table is shown below.
Figure 4
Keystroke conversion table
When the wide-roman input mode is selected, the wide-roman alphabet
can be entered directly, as well as wide-roman numbers.
If you select direct Hiragana or Katakana input and then hold the shiftkey down when you enter the first keystroke of the Kana, the Input dialog will automatically change to Kanji input mode and begin building a Kanji reading from your input. When you have entered the full reading of the Kanji (and any other search criteria), hit the spacebar and the Kanji matching these criteria will be displayed. Clicking a Kanji will input the Kanji, and the Input dialog will revert to direct Hiragana or Katakana input mode again. This makes character entry of Kana and Kanji very fast and efficient.
Table input mode
Selecting any of the buttons along the bottom of the Input dialog will
bring up the respective table of that button. Thus, the full set of Hiragana,
Katakana, wide-roman, English, extended European characters, Cyrillic (Russian)
alphabet, Greek alphabet, Line drawing characters and special Kana characters
are available. To enter any character in a table, simply click it. An example
input table is shown below in Figure 5.
Figure 5
The special Kana input table
The types of characters that can be entered varies between the wordprocessor
and dictionary dialogs (eg. the Find word, Edit word and New word dialogs).
The wordprocessor can accept any type of character that the input system
can generate, whilst the dictionary dialogs can only accept a subset of
the characters. Thus, when entering characters in the dictionary dialogs,
you will find that there are fewer characters to choose from in the tables
(eg. some tables, such as the Cyrillic alphabet table, contain no characters
compatible to the dictionary dialogs).
When you are looking up Kana or Kanji information (this is selectable from the Special menu), you will see all the characters shown in the tables, but characters which can be entered into the dictionary dialogs will be shown in green. Others will be shown in black.
Kanji input mode
Entering Kanji in JWM is now extremely flexible. To change the Input
dialog into Kanji input mode, click the Kanji button on the left
of the input textbox on the Input dialog. The button next to it is the Radical selection
button, and it will bring up a table of radicals you can select from.
You can enter any combination of Kanji properties into the input system and it will automatically filter out all Kanji which don't match your criteria when you press the spacebar to trigger a conversion. It doesn't matter which textbox the cursor is in when you press the spacebar to trigger a lookup. You can also combine multiple radicals to find Kanji, and use any reading of the Kanji you are looking for.
An example of searching for Kanji by multiple criteria is shown below in Figure 6. Here, a reading of "‚µ" is required, combined with a vertical bar radical and 10 character strokes. Note also that the English meaning of each Kanji is shown beside the Kanji, so you can make sure you select the right one, even if some of the Kanji are very similar. The speedkey which matches each of the Kanji in the list is also shown on the left side. Pressing the speedkey is the same as clicking the Kanji, or using the arrow keys and then pressing Return when the correct Kanji is highlighted.
Windows users: Use Right-Alt rather than the Option key. For example, pressing Right-Alt-1 under Windows is equivalent to Opt-1 under the MacOS.
Figure 6
Finding Kanji by multiple criteria
If you have a long list of matching Kanji, you can scroll up and down
a page at a time by holding down the shiftkey when using the arrow
keys. If you press and hold an arrow key, the list will automatically scroll
in the direction selected.