by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2009/07/09 12:16 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2009/07/09/9827062.aspx
So some people noticed that the Wubi IME that used to work on Windows wasn't there anymore.
You may be familiar with the story -- it was there for them in XP but then for Vista (and Windows 7) it wasn't.
The funny thing for me about the Wubi IME is that when I hear the name I have trouble getting the Mr. Mom visual of the small boy asking Michael Keaton Where's my Wubi? (this was a security blanket that his younger son carried around religiously for the first half of the movie; I'm fairly certain they spelled it woobie but they pronounced it kind of the same way).
Anyway, everybody who had the problem insisted they had not installed any third party program yet they had it.
So clearly it came from Microsoft, as far as they could tell.
Now Microsoft is a big place, and sometimes it is not just a matter of the left hand knowing what the right hand is doing; sometimes it is actually the left hand knowing that there is a right hand.
And eventually people found it.
Probably they could gone to Wikipedia and found it much faster, in the article entitled Wubi 86 that gave instructions on how to enable it:
In relation to Windows XP, Wubi 86 is part of the Chinese PRC language LangID 2052; it is a subset. It is found on Disc 4 of the MUI pack for Office XP.
Its IME language code is e0100804.
If you do not have the Office XP MUI installed for simplified Chinese, it will display Pinyin method instead of Wubi86 for the IME. If you need to use Wubi86 on a Windows XP system as an IME or default keyboard layout:
- install the Simplified Chinese MUI for Office XP from Disc 4 of the 12 disc set.
- Then just set the user's keyboard layout to e0100804.
- The registry key is found at "HKCU\Keyboard Layout\Preload" - 1 is the first one, 2 is the second and so on.
- Just create a string value with the name 2 and the data e0100804 to enable Wubi86 as an input option.
This IME actually did come from a third party and the Office team arranged to ship it for the Simplified Chinese version of Office XP (and also, as the above makes clear, in the language pack for Office XP).
I don't know about you, but here is what I was reminded of, here ist he bit from Douglas Adams:
"But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months."
"Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything."
"But the plans were on display ..."
"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
"That's the display department."
"With a flashlight."
"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."
"So had the stairs."
"But look, you found the notice didn't you?"
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."
We didn't go out of our way to make the Wubi easy to enable either, now did we? :-)
Now this IME was generated by a third party as I mentioned, using Microsoft's ImeGen.exe and UImeTool.exe tools.
These tools no longer work in Vista and Windows 7, though as I mentioned in Behold the Table Driven Text Service, Part 10 ("Even Jove nods," Atlas shrugged, "so we'll convert their old files, now.").
And that blog has the instructions for the third party (the one with the source, which is what is required here) to move their data from the old format to the new one.
It was funny, though. I wrote that blog but I had forgotten about it for several responses in the thread asking about ImeGen.exe and UImeTool.exe, so even though I was already recommending the use of TableTextService.dll I had initially forgotten that a way to ease that migration existed.
But everything can be okay now:
Jove will nod.
Atlas will shrug.
And there's a way (eventually) to see that people can (potentially) get their Wubi back....
# Bulletmagnet on 18 Jul 2009 2:50 PM:
No need to get desperate, the Wub(i) lies just beyond...
Mithridates on 9 Aug 2010 12:57 PM:
Has wubi shown up in Vista or Windows 7 yet? My wife is having a damnable time trying to send e-mails using pinyin, of which she has a pretty shaky grasp.
Michael S. Kaplan on 9 Aug 2010 1:14 PM:
As far as I know, no one behind the wubi has done the work I recommended which would give wubi support to Vista and all later versions.