[tlug] Re: About Japanese input systems

[Wataru Tenga <wtenga@??>]

[cross-posted to honyaku-linux and tlug groups]

More on the March issue of Software Design with its series of articles on
Japanese input systems.

The articles are written mainly by the people who are actually involved
in developing the input systems. If you decide you would like to try some
of the various IME introduced in the magazine, instructions are given on
how to build them from source. But if you are using Ubuntu, you can get
packages for prime, honoka and other systems by adding the following to
your respositories:

http://archive.ubuntulinux.jp/ubuntu-ja/ (add the directory for your
version, e.g., dapper/ or edgy/ or feisty/)

I don't know where the authentication key is available from.

I have been experimenting with each of the above input systems. They all
have advantages as well as aspects that take getting used to. It may turn
out that scim-anthy is the most reasonable choice after all, but the
others are interesting to try and will appeal to some of you.

The first article, by Yusuke Tabata who is the original developer of uim,
describes the various IM managers: SCIM (developed by James Su), uim,
m17n-lib, XIM, and IIIMF. Tabata then describes the other parts of the
input system, including pre-edit control, the kana-kanji conversion
engine, and input systems, as well as giving a history of Japanese input
system development. It's a useful article for understanding the
relationship of each of the parts, and learning about the languages used
to develop each part. Anthy gets the most attention in this article.

The older systems kinput2, FreeWnn, and Canna are discussed in the next
article. The third article goes back to SCIM+Anthy, which seems to be the
most widely used system today. SCIM+PRIME is the topic of the next
article, which describes in detail how to build, install and use this
system. As some of you know, PRIME is a predictive system. If you type
"nihongo ny" it immediately converts (tentatively) to 日本語入力. This
can be useful, but it can also drive you nuts when it guesses wrong.

That's as far as I've gotten today. I also enabled SKIM in KDE on
openSUSE, but found out why most distros today don't bother doing so --
it seems you lose more than you gain. Better to stick with SCIM even on
KDE.

Anyway, I highly recommend this magazine to anyone in Japan who has a keen
interest in the various Japanese input systems available for Linux.
Interestingly, I have found no mention at all about ATOK, Just Systems'
proprietary system.

Wataru Tenga