Chinese Input Programs????
 

does anyone know is there a good chinese input program for linux?
also, would it work with gaim?

if it works with linux, it should work with gaim.

I use scim, ÒòΪÎÒÓÃÆ´Òô¡£

I use fcitx.

Chinese support is not included in most distro?

Meaning need to download 3rd party?

I tried fcitx. It wouldn't work with OOo running Fluxbox, and
even though I hate KDE I booted it. Fcitx ran, but the first
character I tried was ni and it did not display the correct Hanzi.
The other choices it gave were incorrect Hanzi and some had
English letters. Typical open source software, IMO. So I booted
back into Windoze, where Chinese input works great.

When I booted back into Slack and Fluxbox, I didn't get my Slack
background, nor my Fluxbox menu. Seems the xmod whatever
changes I'd made for fcitx hosed Fluxbox.

So, just another piece of open source software which doesn't
work, whose instructions when followed to the letter messed up
something else. When I get a break in my work, I'll go fix my Flux
setup in Slack and remove fcitx...

Thanks for the reply. We're not trying to run a Chinese OS,
just input Chinese characters (Hanzi) while running an English OS.
For instance, in Windoze XP you install Chinese support when you
install the OS, and then all you need to do is press Alt + Shift at
any time in any program to input in another language. 你好

In Windoze this is done via an IME (Input Method Editor). Open
source doesn't seem to have caught up yet - supply and demand,
and since most Chinese (at least in China) use Windoze because it's
free here, and the software is written for it and works - this will probably
be something that doesn't get a lot of attention for *nix OSs.

fcitxÖ§³ÖÆ´ÒôºÍÎå±Ê£¬ScimÖ§³ÖËùÓеÄÊäÈ뷽ʽ£¨ºÃÏñSuSE´øµÄÄǸöScim²»ÐУ©¡£

Your input displays as garbage except for fcitx and Scim...
can you input in English so we can understand you?

Can you see Hanzi in my last post? Ni hao

Sorry, If u need chineseinput system i think u should understand chinese well. I use Suse 9.1pro+firefox and my post display well on my screen. I don't know why there are garbage on your screen, it could proved that u can't make u browser well support Chinese!

BTW: Wo Hen Qifeng!

Sorry, if you offer advice I think you should understand computer well. I have no problem displaying or inputting Chinese in my Firefox browser, or any other browser, or any other program in Windoze. However, the same can not be said for Slackware or Mandrake or Debian...

And you didn't answer my question - can you read the Hanzi in my post #6? Or is it that Ni kan bu dong Yingwen?

Are you saying that you're very good at chess, mad, or just windy? ;-)

looks like an encoding issue as setting my main browser, konqeror, to auto causes it to look like garbage. manually setting the encoding to chinese cause it to be displayed right ( i think ) as i see something like:

fcitsome_chinese_charactersscimmore_chinese_characters...

it looked like garbage in firefox for me also. it looks like the encoding information of your post isn't getting set somehow.

as far as chinaman's post, i did see the chinese characters, which i'm going to assume is correct.

maybe u haven't config fcitx with correct Chinese fonts. and if you want your OO input and displayer chinese correct you should install OO 1.1 or above.

to displayer chinese correctly by firefox or mozilla, u should set u brows's encodeing to GBK(if you font support GBK, i.e. simsum) or GB 2312(all chinese font support this).

Okay, thanks megaspaz for pointing me in the right direction concerning the browser. I thought my encoding was set, but it wasn't - I'd just added Chinese as a language.

To update the browser issue, I've tried the following: Firefart 0.9.3 and Internut Exploder 6.0 in Windoze eXperiment. In Slackware Linux 10.0 I've tried Ephiphany (does anyone use that piece of junk?), Galeon, Nutscrape, Mozilla, Firefart 0.9.1 and Konqueror. And the winners are:
Internut Exploder (great looking fonts) and Konqueror (crappy looking fonts) are the only browsers that display all the Chinese input correctly. All those browsers display the 2 characters I inputed on my machine, but only those 2 display all the Hanzi in this thread.

×î½üÔõôÑù£¿

So, that's a browser specific problem (once you have the proper encoding set). Btw - the fonts look crappy in every program in Slackware and Mandrake on my system, and I have all the same fonts installed and selected as I do in Windoze - where Internut Exploder and Firefart display beautifully, as does everything else - but in all four of the Linux distros I've tried, fonts look horrible in every program. That's another issue. Please don't address it in this thread. Email me if you have an idea. I've read and tried everything on the ~www~

However, when tricky_linux started this thread, he wasn't talking about browser display issues. He asked, "is there a good chinese input program for linux?" Let's get it back on topic, please...

Would you please check my setup? This is my .fcitx/config
I'm using OO 1.1.2. I've posted a screenshot of an OOo window when I try to use fcitx.
Maybe you can tell me what the problem is...the screenshot is here ->
https://www.cotse.net/users/servants...x_screenie.png

When I type ni in Pinyin it gives me some funny choices, as you can see on the screenshot.

my browser, IE, can't display the chinese you,chinamen, just posted.
however, i can see the earlier NiHao.
also, have you tried scim yet?
i think i am going to try that this afternoon.

Is your encoding set to GB 2312?

I tried fcitx first because the instructions seemed more clear, and
there was less to install than with scim. Right now I hate Linux,
because too many things don't work right, and it is so much trouble
and takes so much time to get something simple to work.

I will probably try next week. Right now I am running CAT5 cable
from the third floor to the second floor to get my wife on our
network. And the nails keep breaking. There are no wood walls
here, just concrete and steel.

yea, that's a major problem with linux.
don't you even heard of apt-get or yum?
they makes it way easier to install linux.
you might want to look into them.
what i am going to do is try scim and see how it goes.

for your wife's computer, why don't ya just use Wireless Networking?
it will save you lots of time!
If you going to change your mind, B series and G series doesn't really matter.
i have a B series wifi card that i got off ebay around 18 dollar works great in my house.
transfer speed is same as using CAT5 cable connection

Apt-get and yum aren't designed for Slackware. It's not getting
the programs that's the problem. I followed all the instructions for fcitx
exactly. I copied and pasted. And it still does not work correctly. It
screwed up my desktop background, and Fluxbox. Flux won't even
load any more. The problem in Linux is the people who write the
documentation can't write properly. They usually leave out steps. It
seems that instead of taking notes as they go, they try to remember
what they did later on, and it's usually not right.

I don't know how it was in Guangzhou, or wherever you lived, but
here our homes are all concrete and steel. You would have to see
our house. We had my wife's comp on the first floor, but the cable
would have to be over 60 meters. It's much shorter where we now
have it on the second floor.

I don't want wireless. That's just another thing to try to configure
in Linux that would be problems. I read posts all the time where
people can't get wireless to work. It would have to travel a strange
route to get around the concrete and steel from my office on the
3rd floor to the comp on the 2nd floor. Might not work.

Also, wireless is very unsecure. People can hack your network real
easy if you use wireless. The neighbors can scan and use your
connection. A lot of problems. Thanks for the suggestions, though.

I'll be checking to see how you do with scim. Tomorrow I'll have to
remove fcitx and fix what it screwed up in my Slackware OS. I don't
want to use KDE - I'm happy with Fluxbox - and it didn't work right
in Open Office in KDE, either. You can look at the screenshot I posted
the link to and see that they display when I entered "ni" was wrong,
and I could not scroll it to the right for more choices.

I think Linux is mostly still just a hobby kit, unless you want to spend all
your time reading and hacking just to get simple things to work. I'm
tired of spending all my time reading and searching and configuring
over and over to get things to work, that just work in Windoze -
even though I hate Micro$loth, and Windoze!

http://www.linuxfans.org/nuke/module...wtopic&t=81971


I hope it could help you. Good luck.

Note:
Redoffice almost the same as OO

and more, I don't know if you install from RPM package, If so ,there will be more problem, install OO from Official install package is recommended. The official OO Chinese version install package can download here:

http://zh.openoffice.org/downloads_gb.html#linux

We're looking for a Chinese Input Method Editor for Linux,
not a Chinese office program. We're running English OS, not
Chinese OS.

Thanks, though. ;-)

Chinese Input Programs????
 

Hi,

I'm surprised Chinaman, you said in an earlier post in this thread that "Right now I hate Linux,
because too many things don't work right, and it is so much trouble
and takes so much time to get something simple to work."

So why on earth did you choose Slackware? It is well known as a distribution for those who like to do things manually - so you have to put the time and effort in to make it work properly...Mandrake 10? A lot easier to set up etc. but can be buggy at times. Why not try Fedora Core? I got both fcitx and scim working on that just fine, not to mention very quickly with not much effort either. You just have to be aware of your locale settings etc. And make sure you download/install stable versions too - I once tried a development version of fcitx and it was a bit limited in its use. I find the inputs supplied with xcin, zhcon, jmcce, chinput, fcitx & scim to be quite good (I can even input with Cantonese romanisation, which I never found in W2K or XP Pro)...

If you don't enjoy having to tinker with the settings then maybe Linux isn't for you. Stick with Windows, but then again remember to keep your anti-virus & spyware apps up-to-date!

cheers,

jdw

jdw


If you know so much then why don't you spend your time posting a HOW-TO?

grow up. not my fault you were picked on at school...

Didn't think you'd be able to do so...

Look, I only posted what I did because you were attacking open source software without really understanding what it is about...and I just made the point that if you don't like tinkering with it, if you want it to work straight out of the box, then it isn't really what you are looking for. And, yes, I could make a HOW-TO but it would take a lot more time than quickly putting in some helpful advice in LQ Forum. Btw, you have listed yourself as "GURU", is that for real???

HI, there is nothing wrong with your fcitx, u just use Wubi as your input method. change it to Pinyin and u can input Chinese by Pinyin. All u should do is just click the icon with your mouse.


http://mking007.51.net/linux/others/fcitx.png

It's too hard to draw an arrow on that picture ¡ò¡ò

U can't brows chinese by IE becouse U IE can't support Chinese. If u want your browser display chinese correctly , first ,u have chinese fonts on your computer, 2nd,u must set your browser's encode to GB2312.

Re: Chinese Input Programs????
 

God, give me a snapshoot. Are u in Hongkong?

ooppss

Hi,

For Cantonese, try chinput and toggle to the "jyutping" input. google for a list/chart of how the Jyutping Cantonese romanisation works - I can't remember where I found a list but Google is your friend! :o)

cheers,

jdw

Thanks, but I'm only interested in Simplified Chinese. And
I don't think that Pinyin for Mandarin would be the same as
for Cantonese - that's another dialect entirely.

JDW - I was looking in a drawer for an address and came
across part of a thread I'd printed out where someone
posted a little "How to input in Simplified Chinese."
Get a laugh, will ya? http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=50602

cool...you found my previous posts! hope they help a little, they were sort of Mandrake specific though. I think I remember reading that until recently Slackware didn't come with Chinese support built-in, but I could be very wrong on that...

mking007, I am not in HKG but lived there for a few years...try :-

http://cpct92.cityu.edu.hk/lshk/

for a description of Jyutping, but remember to have the webpage's encoding set to Big5...

cheers,

jdw

fcitx works with firefox and OOs
 

for firefox and thunderbird, I need to add a few lines at the beginning of the startup script (firefox or thunderbird) like the following:

## lines I added
XMODIFIERS="@im=fcitx"
export XMODIFIERS
export LC_ALL=zh_CN
export LANG=zh_CN
## end of lines I added

moz_pis_startstop_scripts()
{
...


Also, in order to show all the chinese chars correctly without having converted into unicodes, I have to set the default encoded of firefox to gb2312 (edit->preferences->languages->default encoding). Also, the chinese fonts may be too small in firefox by default, I have to set the minimum size to 16 in order to view them confortably (the setting is in edit->preferences->fonts and colors->minimum size. Now everything works perfectly.

My default encoded of firefox is GBK

mathfeel & mking007 > You might want to check why your chinese words do not show, when some other do.
I have to manually shift Encoding to some Chinese one to be able to read you (不好：我的中文坏的!), when i don't have to do so to be able to read Chinaman "你好".
That's with Opera and Firefox 1.0 on Linux Mandrake with gb2312 & Big5 ttf fonts installed.

JDW > i do agree with you on what you say about some Linux distros beeing quite unusefull to some people that doesn't have the time/motivation to get it works. But still, IMHO *everyone* may get fed up at some point, and we can understand their feeling, quite well, ain't it ?
I also saw that Chinaman posted a *bunch of* posts, which IMHO clearly means you should not post something like "Stick with Windows".

Now did you manage to make xcin, zhcon, jmcce, chinput, fcitx or scim to work without having to make a special user ?

For SCIM, one might wanna check that post with nice help from Burna

Chinese Input Programs????
 

Hi Kozaki,

Thanks for your input, yes, there can be a lot of frustration trying to set up Chinese in the variety of Linux distros available. I've been through it, it's been a long journey!

Unfortunately you need a bit of patience with these things, Linux to me is more like a quiet hobby, it's fun to tinker with things and try my hand at problem solving. Some people do not have the patience or time understandably, and for them I say Windows (or even better, MacOSX!) is a good choice for Chinese input. It's all about the choice...

I have got all those programs working at one time or another without making a special user, just by changing (albeit temporarily) the locale settings for that session to zh_CN or zh_TW, etc.

However, I find that making a special user with all these settings as default is a once off job, and it is easy when I am in my default English environment to just open up a Konsole session and log into the Chinese user there, and from there I can run open office etc. with Chinese input enabled.

That doesn't cause too much disruption. I tend to only use SCIM nowadays, it really has improved quickly over the past 12 months or so...good example of what open source software can achieve in a short time...

Thank you for allowing my ramblings!

Cheers,

jdw

for chinese input problem, why not visit chinese linux forum? thay have the best solutions. there's some links below:
http://www.linuxsir.org/bbs/forumdis...?s=&forumid=42
http://www.linuxfans.org

but thay are chinese sites, i hope U all can understand.

Agreed, but for people only just learning Chinese a site like LQ helps a lot...

jdw

Chinaman, I hope you get your Chinese IME working. Like JDW, I have experience running SCIM under Mandrake. It's not terribly hard to set up -- certainly far easier (and more useful) than TwinBridge or something like that on Windows.

I have a mini-howto for getting SCIM running under Mandrake 9.2 on my website. I'm sure a lot of it isn't appropriate to your system, but it might provide some pointers.

Jiawen,

Or should I say Rachel -- I've checked out your pages before,
and bookmarked them for later reference. For the time being
I just use Windoze XP for Chinese Input, including the use of
Wenlin. I feel like a dog for using Micro$loth anything, but my
need to produce work is too great at this point.

I've just begun changing a lot of things on our little 5 comp
LAN, and this main workstation now has Slack-10.1. I'll maybe
try with your online helps next week or so. I start classes at
Shi Fan Da Xue on Monday, so I'll be needing Chinese input
more; and I'm not going back to the darkside. I've decided that
at some point, I've just got to throw Bill Gates unscrupulous
excuse for an operating system in the garbage and "get on
with it." Hate the decades I spent there, but hey, that's life.

Thanks a lot for the encouragement!

-- He Ming Dao

Chinese Input Programs????
 

Hi Chinaman,

Anything we can do to help you turn from the "Dark Side", we are more than willing to help! You said you are using Slackware 10.1, nowadays I have Slack 10.0 on my laptop, Chinese input works like a charm without too much fussing around, I just installed the SCIM packages from source...

jdw

JDW,

Good to see you're a Slacker! Which packages did you install?
I noticed there are several.

Chinaman,

I've found Slackware is very cool actually and would recommend it to anyone who has a fair understanding of the Linux basics. I use the laptop on the train on the way to work in the morning, Windowphiles stare at it thinking "what the hell is that on this guy's laptop?" because with the Baghira look etc. it looks very nice compared to stuffy ol' Windows 2000 (which I'm using at the moment at work) or something like that.

Which SCIM packages to install? Do what I did and install all of them from the SCIM Source Forge page - it can't hurt!

ciao

jdw

I don't think I need all of them. I've got these
scim-1.2.1.tar.gz
scim-pinyin-0.5.0.tar.gz
scim-input-pad-0.0.3.tar.gz
scim-chinese-0.4.2.tar.gz

I've tried to find some information as to what is actually
needed. For instance, I only use simplified Chinese, and
will input Pinyin, so I don't think I need hangul-0.1.2.tar.gz.
I'll try to find and read the Release Notes and ChangeLogs
for the packages before installing.

Another question -- what desktop environment or window
manager do you use? My last foray into Chinese input, it
seems it was geared towards KDE. I know Rachel likes to
use Gnome, but I use Fluxbox. This is always important to
know, since KDE and Gnome users are the GUI type people,
so they use tools to install that most of us Slackers don't
use, preferring CLI instead.

I might try it today -- or whenever I can find out what all
the different packages are used for, what I need, and what
I don't need.

to Chinaman:

Have u tried fcitx? it's the best Chinese imput system under Linux. it's more fast and stable than SCIM. Most Linux distro use SCIM as Chinese imput method becouse it also contain many other language's imput method, such as Traditional Chinese imput method and japanese/korea imput method, but for Simplified Chinese input methods, fcitx is the best(i have use minichinese imput on Redhat, scim on SuSE and Redhat before) i have see ur previous post. u can't input ni hao (ÄãºÃ) becouse U use Wubi(Îå±Ê) not pinyin(Æ´Òô). Fcitx use three imput method(to i know they are pinyin(Æ´Òô), wubi(Îå±Ê) and neima(ÄÚÂë), also u can add erbi(¶þ±Ê) to fcitx). The newest release of fcitx is 3.1. u can download at fcitx's homepage:
http://www.fcitx.org/main/
and the documentation is here:
http://www.fcitx.org/download/fcitx3.pdf

good luck.

here is the snapshoot


http://cn.geocities.com/mking007cn/Linux/nihao.png

http://mking007.51.net/linux/nihao.png

Thanks for the helps. I can't read much Hanzi,
so I will be slow with the pdf file from FCITX.
I will try this maybe tomorrow. I have to go
to Shi Fan Da Xue today to get my schedule.
I start class on Monday.

Yes, I think Pinyin input is good for me. I
know Pinyin pretty well.

The problems that I had with FCITX last time
I used it, it messed up some other things in
my system. I use Fluxbox window manager.

By the way -- I have to use a proxy server
to get to your website -- the Great Chinese
Firewall.

Are u in China? if u are, u can use the 2nd link. it's much fast in China.

I use xfce so i don't know what happens to ur Fluxbox. but u can contact the author.

If u can't understand Chinese, u can use stardict to help uself. Stardict is the best dictionary program in Linux.
stardict's home page:
http://stardict.sourceforge.net

For documentation, here is the English version.

http://www.fcitx.org/main/?q=node/10