ATOK (エイトック /ˈeitokku/ or /ˈeɪtɔːk/) is a

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

input method editor An input method (or input method editor, commonly abbreviated IME) is an operating system component or program that enables users to generate characters not natively available on their input devices by using sequences of characters (or mouse o ...

(IME) produced by

JustSystems is a Japanese software development house. The company's main products were a word processor, Ichitaro ("JohnnyOne"), a Japanese input method, ATOK. In 2010s, they focus on correspondence education and enterprise software. Description JustSyste ...

, a Japanese software company. ATOK is an IME with roots from KTIS (

Kana The term may refer to a number of syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. Such syllabaries include (1) the original kana, or , which were Chinese characters ( kanji) used phonetically to transcribe Japanese, the most ...

Kanji are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequ ...

Transfer Input System) come with JS-WORD, the Japanese word processor software for

PC-100 The NEC Corporation, NEC PC-100 was a Japanese home computer available on October 13, 1983. It operated on Intel 8086, 8086 CPU 7 MHz, 128KB RAM, 128KB VRAM, a Japanese language capable keyboard and a two button Computer mouse, mouse. It had thre ...

in 1983, but it now supports a variety of platforms including

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for se ...

, Android, and iOS. Once ATOK meant'' Automatic Transfer Of Kana-kanji''. Now, it means '' Advanced Technology Of Kana-kanji Transfer''. It is occasionally taken to stand for '' Awa- TOKushima'', site of the headquarters of JustSystems, or ''Alphabet TO Kanji.''

Functions

Functions vary between versions for different platforms, and the following list is not exhaustive. * Search

kanji are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequ ...

from phonetic input - both using

romaji The romanization of Japanese is the use of Latin script to write the Japanese language. This method of writing is sometimes referred to in Japanese as . Japanese is normally written in a combination of logographic characters borrowed from Ch ...

keyboard and

kana The term may refer to a number of syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. Such syllabaries include (1) the original kana, or , which were Chinese characters ( kanji) used phonetically to transcribe Japanese, the most ...

keyboard. * Search kanji by

radical Radical may refer to: Politics and ideology Politics * Radical politics, the political intent of fundamental societal change *Radicalism (historical), the Radical Movement that began in late 18th century Britain and spread to continental Europe an ...

. * Drawing pad for handwriting recognition. * Reverse retrieval of phonetic input - both to

kunyomi are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequen ...

and

onyomi are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequen ...

. * Text templates for standard phrases, address labels and Japanese

emoticon An emoticon (, , rarely , ), short for "emotion icon", also known simply as an emote, is a pictorial representation of a facial expression using characters—usually punctuation marks, numbers, and letters—to express a person's feelings, ...

s. * Real time auto-completion of text - both Japanese and English. (Example: type "fun" and you immediately get a list of words starting with "fun": function, fun, fund, funk...). * Character information, JIS and

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

codes, pronunciations, related characters. * Japanese date formats. * Character palette for input of special symbols, accented Latin, Russian, etc. * Customizable input keys and keyboard shortcuts for the different functions.

Versions

As of April 2019, the latest version for Windows is 31.1.6; for macOS, 31.0.3; for iOS, 1.6.2; and for Android, 1.8.15. They are available via the ATOK Passport subscription and an annual subscription which comes with Ichitaro.

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

OS/2 OS/2 (Operating System/2) is a series of computer operating systems, initially created by Microsoft and IBM under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci. As a result of a feud between the two companies over how to position OS/2 ...

Palm OS Palm OS (also known as Garnet OS) was a mobile operating system initially developed by Palm, Inc., for personal digital assistants (PDAs) in 1996. Palm OS was designed for ease of use with a touchscreen-based graphical user interface. It is pro ...

, Pocket PC, and

Windows CE Windows Embedded Compact, formerly Windows Embedded CE, Windows Powered and Windows CE, is an operating system subfamily developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows Embedded family of products. Unlike Windows Embedded Standard, which is base ...

are no longer supported. KTIS and ATOK was originally a component of JustSystems' word processor software. Ichitaro released in 1985 allowed the use of ATOK 4 in other MS-DOS applications of the

PC-98 The , commonly shortened to PC-98 or , is a lineup of Japanese 16-bit and 32-bit personal computers manufactured by NEC from 1982 to 2000. The platform established NEC's dominance in the Japanese personal computer market, and, by 1999, more th ...

platform. ATOK 7 was bundled with Ichitaro 4, and was available as a standalone product in 1992. In DOS era, ATOK was spreading with Ichitaro despite competition from VJE, Matsutake, and some other software.

Windows 3.1 Windows 3.1 is a major release of Microsoft Windows. It was released to manufacturing on April 6, 1992, as a successor to Windows 3.0. Like its predecessors, the Windows 3.1 series ran as a shell on top of MS-DOS. Codenamed Janus, Windows 3 ...

, the first retail version of Japanese Windows, bundled the Microsoft IME (MS-IME) input method. MS-IME 97 contained notable improvements, and was bundled with a new retail box of

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturi ...

and

Office 97 Microsoft Office 97 (version 8.0) is the fifth major release for Windows of Microsoft Office, released by Microsoft on November 19, 1996. It succeeded Microsoft Office 95 and was replaced by Microsoft Office 2000 in 1999. A Mac OS equivalent, Mi ...

. The difference between ATOK and MS-IME went smaller. In 2008, JustSystems began a subscription service, ATOK Passport. ATOK 2017 was the last version to be physically shipped as boxed software.

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

chose ATOK as their input method when running under the JP locale in

Solaris 10 Solaris is a proprietary Unix operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems. After the Sun acquisition by Oracle in 2010, it was renamed Oracle Solaris. Solaris superseded the company's earlier SunOS in 1993, and became known for ...

and above, enhancing Sun's already strong Japanese language support. For embedded systems, JustSystems has developed +ATOK. Some Japanese

mobile phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whil ...

s, PDAs,

video game console A video game console is an electronic device that outputs a video signal or image to display a video game that can be played with a game controller. These may be home consoles, which are generally placed in a permanent location connected to ...

s ( PSP, PS3 and

Wii The Wii ( ) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Nintendo. It was released on November 19, 2006, in North America and in December 2006 for most other Regional lockout, regions of the world. It is Nintendo's fifth major ho ...

digital video recorder A digital video recorder (DVR) is an electronic device that records video in a digital format to a disk drive, USB flash drive, SD memory card, SSD or other local or networked mass storage device. The term includes set-top boxes with direct to d ...

s, automotive navigation systems come with +ATOK.

References

External links

* {{Input method Japanese writing system Japanese-language computing Han character input Linux text editors Solaris software Unix text editors

Functions

Versions

See also

References

External links