Re: Three problems with Chinput
Thanks for your reply!
> xterm is in general not i18n ready I think. Using rxvt, Eterm, mlterm,
> gnome-terminal, konsole with an XIM (X input method module?) is
> recommended.
In some respects, xterm is more completely i18n-ised than all
other terminal emulators. It is the only one, e.g., that gets
combining diacritics right, and it can certainly display Chinese
characters (and other Unicode) just fine. It should also work
with XIMs, and in fact it does: using chinput, I can enter Chinese
all right - it's just eating unnecessary CPU cycles, as described,
and when I have more than one xterm, the focus-flicker bug makes
the XIM unusable. This is most definitely a bug rather than a
missing feature. I am using konsole for the time being, but
konsole has redraw problems when it encounters Cyrillic, accented
Latin, Chinese etc., getting glyph widths wrong and scattering the
screen with artifacts.
> dpkg -L chinput, it should list all files of the package, it might
> have a self-explanatory config file under /etc/.
Chinput does not have any config files under either /etc/ or ~/,
nor does it have a manpage. The documentation under
/usr/share/doc/chinput/ is in Chinese except for README.Debian.gz,
which does not help.
> You might want to use xcin for zh_TW locale. But simplified Chinese
> is more common online these days.
I tried both and found chinput more convenient featurewise. My
Chinese class uses traditional Chinese, and I'm going to work with
Classical Chinese, for which I guess I'll need traditional
characters, too.
> BTW: A better pinyin input method might be SCIM, see the previous
> posts on this list about that.
I don't like the fact that SCIM's pinyin module is non-free, and
that SCIM seems to be more of a moving target, under heavy
development.
Stefan
--
Stefan Baums
Asian Languages and Literature
University of Washington
Reply to: