How To: Fix Simplified Chinese Input Method

For no apparent reason a while back, my simplified Chinese input method stopped displaying characters in the character selection window, instead displaying only blocks or squares, looking like this:



You could see the characters in the text of the item you were working with, but when you wanted to select a homonym you couldn't see them in the selection pane (shown above) but rather had to just go through all the characters one at a time to make them display in the text you were working with. This made it even more of a pain to use the simplified Chinese pinyin input method. (Pinyin is a phonetic way to type in Chinese characters.)

This had started in Mac OS X 10.2.x and continued after my upgrade to Panther, despite my hopes that the upgrade would resolve it. Subsequent upgrades all the way to 10.3.8 didn't do any good either. Simplified Chinese worked fine with other users, so I knew the problem was within my own user folder. The other input methods I use - traditional Chinese, Japanese, and third-party pseudo-input method TypeIt4Me - had no problems whatsoever.

I called Apple to try to resolve this problem. They had me remove the ~/Library/Fonts/ and a few other folders from ~/Library/, but to no avail. They ultimately told me that what I needed to do was to either use a new user (which would require me to reset all my preferences) or go through every folder in ~/Library/ and log out each time to see if that folder was the cause. Not feeling like using either of these time-consuming methods to solve the problem, I did what any diligent computer user would do: I procrastinated.

Until today. Today the simplified Chinese input method decided to go a step farther and not even produce the characters. I would type in the pinyin and nothing would appear in the text when I hit the space bar to cover the pinyin to characters. So now it was time to resolve the problem as I needed to use Chinese.

Here's how I did it.

I took every single file out of ~/Library/, put then in a folder on the desktop, and logged out. I logged back in on the same user. I opened up ~/Library/ and noted down all the files that were there in TextEdit. I then opened System Preferences, went to the International preference pane and then the Input Menu tab. I checked simplified Chinese. I then noted again all the files in ~/Library/ in TextEdit and compared it to what I originally had. Any files that were in the new list that were not in the old list I could conclude were added there by the simplified Chinese input method (and were probably the only files of any relevance). I then went to my old Library folder on the desktop and deleted all of these files. I put the remaining files back in ~/Library/, logged out, logged back in, and, voila, it was working again.

The files that I deleted were the following:

~/Library/Caches/com.Apple.preferencepanes.cache
~/Library/ChineseInputMethodPlug-in
~/Library/Documentation/
~/Library/Documentation/Help/
~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.Apple.HIToolbox.000a95d5f14c.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.Apple.help.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.Apple.systempreferences.plist
~/Library/Preferences/tmmr.rem
~/Library/Preferences/user.rem

While this did require a little bit of setting new preferences, it was minimal compared to what I would have had to do had I followed Apple's support's advice. It seems this method could be used to troubleshoot any problem that might have something to do with corrupted or damaged files, especially when affecting a single user.

In any case, Apple could have gotten me through this in ten minutes had they known what they were doing.