Re: tlug: kanji input setup

[Jonathan Q <jq@example.com>]

On Fri, 19 May 2000 adam@example.com wrote:

> Netscape, and the Gimp, but she would like to be able to write email and
> web page content in Kanji.  She has purchased a "Japanese keyboard" for

While I personally prefer the Japanese keyboard layout, it isn't
necessary to have one to do Japanese input.


> determine that there are some programs known as "kinput2", "wnn", and
> "canna" for entering Kanji.  Locating these programs has proven all but
> impossible; they have no entries on freshmeat's appindex, for example.

That's odd; I remember they used to, and I have seen announcements for
them on Freshmeat; I wonder what happened.

>   I managed to find rpm's of kinput2-wnn and kinput2-canna on
> linux.or.jp's RPM archive, but when I try to run the included binaries
> they segfault immediately.  I can't seem to locate source code
> distributions or homepages for these programs.  I can't even figure out
> which of them she needs!

One good information resource is PJE:

http://www.pje.linux.or.jp/Howto/PJE-0.1.5/html-e/PJE-HOWTO.eng.html

You can get source and binary RPMs here (getting the source RPMs and
building them on the target machine would be a good idea). Besides
kinput2, Canna or Wnn, and Japanese fonts, you will also at least want
to have kterm, basically a J-enabled xterm.

To have the best shot at compatibility, you might want to read the PJE
info cited above for background knowledge on what you need to do, then
grab RPMS (source and binary are both available; source is, of course,
recommended) from a Red Hat 6.2 mirror in Japan, where the Red Hat
6.2-j distro is avaliable. One of them is at:

ftp://ftp.kddlabs.co.jp/pub/Linux/packages/RedHat/redhat/redhat-6.2-ja/

You can find others at http://www.redhat.com/mirrors.html

>   All we need is a program for X-Windows which allows her to type Kanji
> characters into a small window, and then paste the results into Netscape's
> mail composer or her text editor.  I suspect she needs to change editors,

If you use the Japanese-patched (well, hacked) Netscape, known as
Muriyari, you don't need to cut and paste; you can input Japanese
directly into Netscape.

> but emacs or vi are probably beyond her ability to use at this point.

Try Xemacs; it's GUI and handles Japanese well.  When I was working as a
web content developer, Xemacs was my HTML editor of choice.

If she really needs to do a lot of Japanese input, she might find that
Canna and Wnn4 are, well, less than ideal.  They do not do well at all
on converting long strings, which in many cases reduces you to inputting
one string at a time. If this happens, you might want to consider
getting one of the Japanese Linux distributions that include Atok12se
for Linux.  Atok has been around for years for Windows and Mac, and came
out a year or so ago for Linux.  It is the only Linux Japanese input
method that can convert my address in a single pass, and other strings
of similar length.  Overall, Japanese input on Linux still isn't as good
as it is on Win and Mac, but Atok for Linux was a quantum leap.  It is,
however, a proprietary product available in binary form only, so you
can't download it.  You need to buy a distro that includes it, which are
TurboLinux-J, Red Hat-J, maybe Vine (can anybody confirm that about
Vine, or are there any other J distros that include Atok?).

Weekends are kind of slow on TLUG, so you'll probably bet some better
answers than mine later, but this should at least get you started.

Cheers,

Jonathan

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