Re: [tlug] CJK Input Methods

["David J Iannucci" <jlinux@example.com>]

On Fri, Jul 5, 2024, at 20:12, Yasuaki Kudo wrote:
> I don't type Japanese often so I can get by with the really poor
> quality of Mozc in Ubuntu (latest version) .

Forgive my reaction, but... really?? You don't type Japanese often? :-)
Maybe you mean: on this particular machine...

> I want the Javanese [sic :-] input in Linux to work normally like
> Windows or IPhone, so we don't even need to talk about it!

Tell me about it. I'm still struggling with it after all these years (I
use Gentoo, and occasionally start from a fresh install that's somewhat
different from what I was doing before - I haven't used one of the more
"consumer-oriented" distros for many years)

It's really just bizarre and sorta shameful that this is not just a
Solved Problem, with one "brand-leader" OSS project that almost everyone
uses, where if you follow some simple instructions and are not afraid of
the shell and plaintext config files, you can set it up easily and it
Just Works.

An anecdote from my recent experience: I had been using Google Translate
for input for a long time (that's how infrequently _I_ was typing J :-),
but now I want to type much more often, and so I tried to set things up.
I used SCIM and Anthy. These are sufficient for my needs - IF they work.

I found that I could not activate the J input in Firefox under normal
conditions. It would work if I set LANG="ja_JP.UTF-8" in the Firefox
execution environment. This made some kind of sense to me, but I didn't
want to do it because it causes the browser UI to change to J fonts (for
English), which looks ugly (and probably other locale changes that I
wouldn't want). But....

... at some point, after something must have changed, though I
have no idea what it could be, SCIM/Anthy started working in my
Firefox, even without the env settings! What?? This kind of thing
drives me crazy.

Other apps in which I would use J input would easily get wedged up
if I looked at them cross-eyed, and I would have to kill them and
restart (and lose some input). Ugh. Mostly, everything I do on my Linux
machines works well and smoothly and there are no problems. Except this.

> After reading the article below, I thought Japanese input software
> development is potentially a very good thing to start.

Wouldn't it certainly be better to fork one of the existing projects?

> The article I found describing the current state of affairs (in
> Japanese):
>
> https://chienomi.org/articles/linux/202301-mozcdic-ut-mozcdict-ext.html

Thanks for this pointer. My pride wants me to read the original, but
it's a lot, and I might break down and feed it to a translator :-)

Dave


> -Yasu