How do I get traditional chinese input with pinyin on Ubuntu 20.04?

Solution 1:

I'm not sure about Google pinyin, but

if you add the standard fcitx pinyin, you should be able to toggle between traditional & simplified by using the 漢/汉 button on the input bar.

fcitx-configtool will help you select the option to have the input bar always show.

Btw, you don't need any language support files.

Also, if you install fonts-hanazono it will ensure that most all characters, even rare variant ones display correctly.

And, since you referenced Hong Kong, and are talking about traditional characters, you may be interested in fcitx-table-cangjie5.

With it, you can input:

1. Traditional Chinese
2. Simplified Chinese
3. Variant Chinese characters
4. Japanese variants
5. Cantonese characters.
   (~70,000 characters)

You can learn the method in about a month & there is a pinyin option if you forget what a character looks like. You input the ` symbol followed by pinyin.

Once you learn:

1. You can type very fast & accurately without having to scroll through lists of characters
2. You can type any character you see or visualize.
3. You can easily work with dialects because you're not having to code-switch back into Mandarin to type pinyin.
4. You can use sites like http://chinesecj.com/ime/cj5.php (cutt.ly/oiar) from any computer to type any character.

Anyway, hope that helps and best of luck to you!

Solution 2:

Actually, you can indeed configure intelligent pinyin to show only traditional Chinese characters. So instead of switching to another input method, you could just do the following:

1. Go to Settings > Keyboard > Input Sources
2. Find Chinese (Intelligent Pinyin)
3. Click on the three-dot options button and go to Preferences
4. In Initial State change Chinese from Simplified to Traditional