[Techtalk] How to do Multi-Language documents and e-mail...

agoats@compuserve.com agoats57 at gmail.com
Sat Dec 3 04:23:47 UTC 2016


The past month has been pretty busy, but to update where I am:

It is "Input Method Editor" and there are quite a few. Slackware came 
with SCIM, but I have not been able to get it work inside of anything. I 
can get some things to show up, it gives me Hiragana, Katakana and 
Kanji, but no way to get the characters into OpenOffice or Thunderbird 
(or anything else for that matter). It is noted for not being very 
friendly and not always working very well.

Anthy is used by many of the Input Method Editors and it appears to do 
what I have seen: as you type the characters change as the word 
progresses going from Hiragana to Katakana and if appropriate, a series 
of Kanji to select from.

IBus is next on my list to try, but it may take a while before I get 
back with progress/status. Literature out there rates it highest and 
with the greatest amount of success integrating with other software. 
Thanks Little Girl for that input!

Until I have anything more to report... thanks everyone!

Alvin


On 10/30/2016 02:42 PM, Kai MacTane wrote:
> On 10/29/2016 13:21, agoats at compuserve.com wrote:
>>
>> In some of the Japanese videos, you can see their computer screen 
>> while typing and it starts with Hiragana text and converts to Kanji 
>> as they continue to type (for those who don't know, there are 3 
>> characters sets, Hiragana for Japanese words, Katakana that is 
>> normally used for foreign words like computer, coffee, 
>> English/German/Russian names and lastly Kanji, the Chinese characters 
>> used by Japan). Written Japanese is a mix of all 3 at once.  As the 
>> word is being typed in Hiragana syllables, when enough syllables 
>> forms a Kanji word, it gets changed to Kanji. If additional syllables 
>> modify the Kanji word, the Kanji is changed again.  So.... is this 
>> special software or is it common in OpenOffice and Thunderbird once I 
>> get the settings set correctly?
>
> This is what's called a "Japanese input method editor" or "Japanese 
> IME" for short. You'd install it as a core part of your GUI layer 
> (Gnome, KDE, whatever), not as part of any individual app.
>
> I generally use Linux as a server platform, so my Japanese IME 
> experience is all on Windows and Android. Wikipedia's List of input 
> methods for UNIX platforms 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_input_methods_for_Unix_platforms> 
> may have some useful starting points for you, or just knowing that 
> "Japanese input method" and "Japanese IME" are things to search on may 
> help you.
>



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