[LUAU] X Input Methods

Hawaii Linux Institute wp at HawaiiLinux.us
Tue Oct 12 10:28:44 PDT 2004


Hi MonMotha-

Unless you are willing to become an expert in emacs/mule, your best bet 
at the present time is to go with Fedora.

Sorry this violates your "No distro specific" mandate.  But, again at 
the present time, the implementation of "alternate input methods" in 
Fedora (and in RHEL) is so superior to all other distros, I just don't 
see any way not to discuss it.

Since FC2, Red Hat has decided to use iiimf as the (universal) default 
input method for CJK.  It was a disaster when first came out and many 
users immediately switched to the old method (e.g., kinput2 for 
Japanese, xcin for traditional Chinese, Chinput for simplified Chinese, 
nabi for Korean, etc.) after installation.

However, with FC3-Test 3, iiimf seems to be in an amazingly good shape.  
Fecora Core 3 also provides an im-switching tool for users to move 
between iiim and any of the old im protocols.

At the present time, iiimf is being developed mainly by corporate 
developers (Red Hat, IBM, Sun, Novell, and a couple of smaller companies 
in Hong Kong and Japan), and there is very little documentation.  I am 
sure this will improve when iiimf gets into a better shape.

Red Hat has made iiimf a GTK2 module.  To invoke it, all you need to do 
is to specify the locale and run the module (and use control-space key 
combo to switch b/t your default language and the new language).  To 
input Japanese characters, you will first type in Romanji (Roman 
characters) using your English keyboard.  Your screen will show the 
corresponding Katakana.  Then you can use the down cursor key to flip 
into Hirigana, Kanji, and back to Katakana.  wayne



MonMotha wrote:

> Yeah, I actually have a question for once :)
>
> I'm not really an X guy, so I wouldn't even know where to begin on this.
>
> I'm interested in setting up alternate input methods to allow me to 
> type characters that aren't on my keyboard in X.  I'm mostly 
> interested in the greek characters as well as Katakana from Japanese 
> (and if I get Hirigana and Kanji as a bonus, so be it).
>
> No distro specific solutions are allowed (other than maybe Debian if 
> you must, though I'd prefer to keep it distro neutral so I could do it 
> on another distro if I had to).  Any software that Debian has a 
> package for (which is pretty much everything) can be used (so things 
> like the kana manager), but I need to know the actual config changes 
> that need to be made.
>
> --MonMotha
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