Japanese input (was RE: tlug: Japanese)

["Matthew J. Francis" <asbel@example.com>]

On 06-Jun-98 Jonathan Byrne - 3Web wrote:

>  The arrow keys, space bar, enter key do not behave normally in
>  Japanese input mode.  For example, to move the cursor up or down,
>  forward or  backward, or to start a new line, I have to leave
>  Japanese input mode, put the cursor where I want it, then restart
>  Japanese input mode.  Does  your system do this too?  Or did it?  If
>  I can customize this, I'll spend some time flogging this after the
>  TL 2.0 release is out and installed and I know I won't be changing
>  anything for a while.  Or if it can't be changed, I guess I'll just
>  have to live with it.
>  
>  My goal is to have a Japanese input environment that behaves just like
>  an  English input environment, except the language being input isn't
>  English.

Perhaps this is my cue to un-lurk and say a few words. I'm perhaps a
little further away from Tokyo than most here (Sheffield, England), but
have been sitting around in the background listening to the many useful
tidbits on Japanese and Linux...

  Anyway, If you've used Windows at all, perhaps you've come across a
little free Japanese word processor called (strangely enough) JWP; it has
builtin EDICT searching and several useful sorts of character-lookup
method, but perhaps what I liked about it most is that the input works
sensibly, as you describe. Kanji could be input without losing
editability, and without focus gratuitously jumping around the place.


  So, recently, I and a small number of other interested people have been
putting some work into bringing a similarly easy-to-use environment
(especially for us thick non-native Japanese speakers :) to X and Unix.
Originally I had started writing my own Japanese text editor in GTK, but
lately I've been more convinced that extending Yudit to do what we want
is the better path - I could spend a long, long time making a text editor
(the original JWP was actually more a text editor than a WP anyway) that
would still be far less good than Yudit's already existing text widget.
And it wouldn't do Unicode, either.

  With that thought, one of the first items on my list of things to
attempt to add into Yudit was JWP-like "never-leave-the-spot" Kanji
entry. Yudit does already support Canna and KInput2, but I can't see
a really obvious way of making KInput2 behave right either - so
essentially I was looking at adding a direct interface to Canna without
going through KInput2.

  But if there's a better way to configure KInput2, I'd be very
interested to hear about it...


What we have in the way of code already is incidentally:

 - A (read-only) Japanese text viewer that can import Win-JWP format
   files. Probably to be abandoned, as I mentioned.

 - An essentially complete radical-lookup helper program

 - Some EDICT-searching support code that may sometime morph into
   an X dictionary

 - Some donated fragments of C++ for cooking X BDF fonts into printable
   Postscript


As you can see, there's only one usable component yet, the radical
lookup. But, more will be coming (Especially after I finish these blasted
end-of-year exams... ). All offers of coding help will of course be
gratefully recieved :)


One more thing I don't know if anyone else might be interested in - I'm
slightly working on an EDICT client for my PalmPilot (the PP Pro - 1M
version). There's no working Pilot code as yet, but I am working on the
other side of the problem; the Pilot proglet shouldn't in fact be too
difficult, the nasty bit is rather compressing EDICT down from 3.5 megs to
a manageable 6-700K... I'm getting close, but not quite there yet.

Perhaps there are other palmtop-like uses for a super-compressed
dictionary?


Cheers,
-Matt.

"The results of this intrusion into your life will be used 'responsibly'
in ways you cannot even begin to imagine. Of course, the innocent have
nothing to fear from the rapidly expanding data industry."
 - Radiohead, Airbag/How Am I Driving?

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