Up until now I have done most of my character writing by hand. However, since I just started uploading five textbooks worth of word lists into Skritter, I have encountered a problem. As I get to typing more obscure characters, I have a hard time finding them in my typing character list. For example, when I went to enter yun4tang4, no character due to before mentioned situation, I ended up having to use my pad's software to write out the character. Slow and irritating. What does everyone else here use for typing characters?

I just use the standard Windows Chinese keyboard entry. Occasionally I have a tough time finding a character in the list, but the vast majority of the time if I type it as part of a multi-character word it comes up fine. If I just want the character by itself I'll type it as part of a word then delete the other character.

sogou pinyin and google pinyin are both great.

Like dorritg said, the write two delete characters delete one trick is neccessary sometimes.

I highly recommend Google Pinyin for this, especially because it has lots of customizable features (including showing the list in a larger font so you can see the characters more clearly). It's also very intuitive, and learns your frequently typed words better then Microsoft's IME. I also like that Google's includes more proper nouns (such as names of important people).

You also don't need to write tones for Google Pinyin, which can be good or bad, depending on how you look at it: bad because it doesn't force you to recall tones, but good because it gets you typing a lot faster. And anyway, once you learn the tones, having to type that extra number for every character becomes an annoyance.

By the way, I'm curious, what were you looking for with yun4tang4? MDBG doesn't give any entries for a word with that pronunciation either.

熨烫 (动词) It means to iron, as in the iron clothing. Most of the time, if I remember correctly, they just say 烫. However, upon an occasion they do write/say the other. It was also already in Skritter's database when I put the word in my list.

I will look into Google Pinyin. Thanks for all of the help everyone.

We do also have a rudimentary pinyin lookup that you can use, if you think it's in Skritter. I just put "yun4tang4" into the Queue and it pulled up the word when I validated.

I just finished typing up one of the five text books I have to input, and it is a lot faster with Google pinyin. I will also remember that trick Nick. Thanks all. I only had to use my pad to input one or two characters during the remaining 3/4s of that book. This will go much faster now.

Thank heavens half of my previous job was data entry. This would be so much slower if I wasn't already used to this kind of stuff.

Sogou ime has some tricks for typing difficult characters (生僻字, rarely seen characters). E.g. for 熨

Type pinyin yun+tab+zh (zhe, heng - the first two strokes in 熨) and it highlights it

Type pinyin yun+tab+wh (w for wei, the pronunciation of the top part of 熨, 尉, h for huo, the bottom part) and it highlights it. You need to know pronunciation of the top part tho.

Type u for stroke entry, then as much of zhphh (initials for zhe heng pie heng heng, names of the first five strokes of yun) as you need until the character you want is on screen

More (in Chinese) at http://pinyin.sogou.com/help.php