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

[Little Girl]

Hey there,

agoats at compuserve.com wrote:

> The issue is how to set up my system to be able to compose Japanese
> in OpenOffice/Libre Office and in Thunderbird. It would be nice if
> midnight commander, dolphin and others would show the Japanese
> characters which they currently do not, even though I installed ALL
> language sets during my Slackware64 install.

My son was learning Japanese for a while and had an input method he
used. It's been several years since he's used it, so there may have
been changes to its interface, but here's what he told me about it:

It's called iBus, and it's an input method which is default in Ubuntu
(not sure if it is in your system). What happens is that you press a
combination of keys (like Ctrl and Space) at the same time and
suddenly you're typing in Japanese (Romanji). Pressing the same key
combination again puts you back into English.

Whenever you type the Romanji of a Hiragana character, it will become
a Hiragana character, so, for example, if you type ne, it will become
ね (hopefully it traveled well in email).

Japanese doesn't natively have spaces, except between sentences, so
iBus uses the Space bar for you to intelligently change your Hiragana
into Katakana or Kanji characters. As you type, iBus highlights
anything it recognizes as a word or individual character that you
might like to change. Every time you press the Space bar, a drop-down
menu opens offering you the various different Kanji or Katakana
combinations available for the currently highlighted text. You can
also manually select/highlight any word and press the Space bar to be
offered the drop-down menu for it if you'd rather change them after
the fact instead of as you type.

Note: iBus stops highlighting words when you enter a period at the
end of a sentence, so you will be able to add a space without being
offered a drop-down menu for it.

It takes a while to get used to, but once you get the hang of it, you
can get quite fast.

Note: He doesn't know whether the key combination can be
user-defined, but it probably can, and that's pretty quick to find
out. I'll probably be finding out with you, because I type in German
quite a bit, so this would be quite useful for me, too.

-- 
Little Girl

There is no spoon.