BetterCJKSupport

Lorenzo E. Danielsson wrote:

>I understand Debian Sid has new SCIM packages that should be coming our
>way soon. I think that is a good starting point. But since there is no
>final decision as of yet as to which input method(s) to support, I think
>continuous testing is also required. I really don't mind doing that,
>because currently I can get Japanese input working, but I've had no
>success with Chinese. I'd be very, very happy if I can enter text in
>*any* language by the time Dapper is released!
>
>So far I haven't heard of anybody working on Korean input though. I
>sadly know very little about how Korean input works, but surely we are
>going to make sure that it also ROCKS, or? 
>  
>
I'll also be happy to take part in testing input software, since I can 
understand some Korean, Chinese and Japanese, and have a need for all three.

Concerning Korean input, SCIM actually has some usable input modules for 
Hangeul (both romanized and using a Korean keyboard layout), but I don't 
think it has any methods for inputting text with Chinese characters, 
which will also be useful in certain academic contexts, for instance. 
The only input method I know of is "Ami", which is a XIM-based method 
that has to be run under a ko_KR.eucKR locale or something in that order.

When it comes to inputting Chinese, however, SCIM has several input 
modules that provide several methods of inputting several variants of 
Chinese. I've only used scim-pinyin myself (which was called 
scim-chinese at the time, and still is in Breezer), but I can tell you 
that if any of the other modules are of the same standard, it should be 
quite sufficient for most users. I believe SCIM's main developer is 
Chinese, incidentally.

You might not get everything to work with that particular set of 
packages though - SCIM is highly modularized, and it's possible to have 
it installed without having all the modules working properly. Some of 
the modules have been created by 3rd-party developers, and we might need 
those to be functional as well in order to provide full functionality 
for all languages. For instance, scim-anthy or scim-prime are very 
likely to be needed for Japanese input - scim-tables-ja are not useful 
as anything but example files.

-David