[tlug] Japanese input on Debian Testing

["Daniel A. Ramaley" <daniel.ramaley@example.com>]

I've been running Debian Testing for a number of years, the last 4 or 5 
of which i've had Japanese input configured via UIM and Anthy.

A recent (well, a few months ago) update broke Japanese support in a few 
subtle ways. Some applications would accept Japanese input, some would 
not. For those that would not work, if i were to type in them while the 
IM was set to Japanese, regular ASCII would come through. (So instead of 
getting "日本語" i'd get "nihongo ".) Oddest of all is that the UIM toolbar 
would never show changes between Japanese and English when i hit the key 
combo to switch. But for those apps that were *not* broken, it worked 
anyway.

A few weeks ago i was playing around, trying to figure out how to fix 
this. In the process i discovered that if i set "LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8" 
then Japanese input magically started working in (almost) all apps 
again! (Note that my other LC_ variables are set to "en_US.UTF-8".) Not 
only that, but the UIM toolbar started behaving normally! I thought, 
problem solved. But not quite... some other things broke. If i run an 
application that happens to be written in Java, it displays dialog boxes 
and prompts in Japanese. Many applications now print in A4, even though 
i'm stuck in an anachronistic country that still uses letter paper. For 
some applications (Firefox/Iceweasel in particular), even if i 
explicitly tell the application to use letter paper, it still prints A4. 
I've also noticed that KDE applications (Kmail) still won't accept 
Japanese input; instead i have to open a text editor, type Japanese, 
then copy/paste into Kmail. Gnome applications (such as gnome-terminal) 
work just fine, though. Note that i don't use either desktop 
environment, just a couple of their respective applications.

Any ideas? I'd just like to get back to how things were, when i had a 
system all in English, with my locale set to en_US.UTF-8, and where UIM-
Anthy was usable to input Japanese into any application and where i 
didn't have any odd printing issues.

At the time i set up Japanese input, UIM/Anthy seemed to be the most 
modern and "correct" way to do it, with SCIM slowly fading away. Now 
IBus seems to be the most accepted way to do it; would it be worth 
trying to rip out my Japanese input system and rebuild it around IBus?

__
Daniel A. Ramaley
Network Engineer 2

Dial Center 112, Drake University
2407 Carpenter Ave / Des Moines IA 50311 USA
Tel: +1 515 271-4540
Fax: +1 515 271-1938
E-mail: daniel.ramaley@example.com