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Re: Xemacs and Chinese input



Robert Storey wrote:

On Sat, 26 Apr 2003 15:58:18 +0800
Petr Simon <debian@klubko.net> wrote:


Hi David,
thanks for help. Sorry for being not very clear. In fact I was restless

I'm glad to help, but my name's not David.

and I found it somewhere. But could you help me with another problem. I am going to write my MA thesis and I have to input so much strange stuff (you probably know) like Chinese, Czech (my native lang which uses few diacritics), pinyin and some more. So the best thing I've heard about so far is emacs. Right now I am struggling with IPA. I select ipa input method and I see that it interacts (characters get underlined), but nothing is displayed. Sometimes it gives me error about being unable to instantiate font for face <somethig>, charset ipa, so I simply turned that off in edit faces. But I still can't input IPA.

Sounds very much like you haven't installed an IPA font. I'm not sure which
deb package it is, but I guess it's "xfonts-tipa," to judge from the output
of apt-cache show:

bob@sonic:~$ apt-cache show xfonts-tipa
Package: xfonts-tipa
Priority: extra
Section: x11
Installed-Size: 96
Maintainer: Rafael Laboissiere <rafael@debian.org>
Architecture: all
Source: tipa
Version: 1:1.1.beta-3
Depends: tipa (>= 1:1.1.beta), xbase-clients (>= 3.3.3.1-5)
Filename: pool/main/t/tipa/xfonts-tipa_1.1.beta-3_all.deb
Size: 5978
MD5Sum: f2250bb2ccfb4635dffc7fd180b29ac7
Description: X11 PostScript Type 1 font for the Phonetic Alphabet
This package contains type 1 version of the Phonetic fonts of the TIPA
(Tokyo International Phonetic Alphabet) for X11.  It contains the pfb and
afm files.  The installed X font has the silipa encoding (see
http://www.sil.org/computing/fonts/encore-ipa.html).

Try installing that and see if it works.

Before you do a great deal of writing in Xemacs, make sure that you know
how to export the file to wherever it needs to finally wind up (as a Word
*.doc file, or HTML, etc). It would be embarassing to finish your thesis
only to find that the professor won't accept it in Xemacs format (standard
ASCII text), and you haven't figured out how to export it to a format he
will accept. If the professor wants it printed on paper, that should be
easier, but try it first.

I've found that converting Chinese to a Word *.doc file (Chinese Windows)
works fine, as long as the file isn't too large in size (about 50K or
less). You can always split a file if it's too large. Converting to HTML
has proven to be no trouble at all. But Chinese has standardized codes
(either BIG5 or GB), but I don't know if that is the case with IPA. If you
need to mix Chinese and IPA in the same file, I don't know if it is
possible unless you use Unicode. And I don't have any experience using
Unicode, so I can't help you there.

And another thing,
how do you actually input pinyin (I mean latin chars with tone marks). I believe that it should be possible.

If your input method is chinese-py-b5, you MUST use tones. So "hello" is
"ni3 hao3 ma1". But chinese-py-b5 only outputs traditional Chinese
characters, not simplified Chinese. If your input method is chinese-gb or
chinese-punct, you cannot specify tones.

good luck,
Robert


Sorry about your name Robert,
I was probably reading simultaneously two posts. As for the fonts. I thought that I don't have the apropriate fonts, but I have xfonts-tipa. Really don't know. As for the pinyin. What I want is to be able to actually input pinyin transcription of characters with tone marks above syllables. I found these characters in some table in emacs, but I don't know how to input them. And thanks for the warning. I make my homework on the export thing. And learn it well before I type my stuff in.
Thanks
Petr



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