newbie: dapper: skim and latin characters

[Christian Fröbel]

Hello Gabriel,

I don't know much about it but maybe I can be of help...

Let's assume you installed all the necessary packages. First thing you have to 
do is to start skim (Alt+space "skim" <enter>, or KMenu->Utilities->Skim). 
Then you should see an icon in the system tray.

Next, fire up a new KMail composer window. There in the text area right-click 
and select "Select Input Method"->scim from the menu. Hmm, as I try it now, 
it doesn't work anymore. But you should see a little pane now floating 
somewhere around the desktop. If not, try Ctrl+space; maybe this brings up 
the pane. In that pane you should see the currently selected input engine. 
Click on it and select the one you like. I only had one (simplified) Chinese 
input engine. And after selecting it, typing on my keyboard produced some 
uncomprehesible characters, probably Chinese:)

I noticed that right-clicking in an edit field of a KDE application doesn't 
always bring up a menu containing the "Select Input Method"-item, e. g. kedit 
and kate. That's low. And maybe that's where XIM comes into play because it 
does not depend on Qt/KDE or GTK (but that's a guess). I had a look at my 
SuSE installation and they seem to use XIM. But with that I don't know if 
they could manage Chinese.

Let me know how far you get. I think booting Windows every time you need to 
write some Chinese is not really an option. And maybe someone else can shed 
some light on this topic.

cheers,
  Christian