newbie: dapper: skim and latin characters

[Gabriel Dragffy]

I am very interested in your experience with SKIM. I'm British but currently 
working in China. I need to be able to input Chinese but I can't get SKIM to 
work in Dapper, I must always reboot in to Windows. I had the same problem of 
not being able to find any documentation or help on the internet or with the 
program. I have various input modules installed but no matter what I do I 
cannot switch to Chinese input, can you tell me how you switch input methods 
please?

On Saturday 27 May 2006 20:03, Christian Fröbel wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I'm a long time SuSE user and now I'm trying Kubuntu for the first time. I
> freshly installed the 6.06 LTS RC1 version. I chose English language and
> English keyboard layout. However, I'd like to input all kinds of latin
> characters, especially German umlauts.
>
> On SuSE (with KDE), there was some kind of prefix input system, e. g.
> typing "o gives german umlaut ö, or Alt Gr+s gives ß (I switched to German
> keyboard layout to input these characters). Back then I didn't care how it
> worked, it just did.
>
> I tried to figure out how it is supposed to work with Kubuntu. I read
> something about scim and skim. I searched the internet sites, the package
> descriptions and so on but couldn't find anything of real use.
>
> I installed almost all packages related to scim and skim, such as skim,
> scim, scim-uim, scim-m17n and so on. I started skim and got an applet icon
> in the panel. From there I worked my way to the configuration dialog. Most
> of the options there don't mean anything to me. But I noticed a long list
> of IMEngines. Among them something like UIM-latin, which sounds promising.
>
> I went on to try it out. In the KMail composer I right-cliked in the edit
> field. In the "Select Input Method" menu I selected scim. Then I tried out
> several IMEngines (including UIM-latin). I got a lot of Japanese and other
> characters but nothing close to German umlauts.
>
> Also there are no descriptions of the IMEngines. I couldn't even find some
> docs in the internet. Maybe UIM-latin is the right one, but how does it
> work?
>
> BTW: In the KDE menu "Select Input Method" the default is XIM. What is this
> anyway? Obviously there are the two different systems; scim and XIM. Which
> is the right one to go with? Where can I set the default input method used
> by kde/qt?
>
> Thanks for your time.
>
> regards,
>   Christian