[உபுண்டு_தமிழ்] Technical - SCIM for QT Based Applications

K. Sethu skhome at gmail.com
Sun Nov 12 17:32:18 GMT 2006


Dear all

Some 3-4 months back I had found in Dapper that with SKIM wrapper for 
SCIM installed on KDE, the input framework seem to start OK, but showed 
some instabilities (such as keyboard freezing) in sessions lasting more 
than just a few minutes.  Since then I had not gone back to testing how 
inputting works in KDE either in Dapper or Edgy. My convetional wisdom 
had been that these applications need SKIM wrapper and also that there 
had been some problems reported in past about a patching for QT being 
not available.

But yesterday I found that things are not that bad and in fact pretty 
good as regards a large number of  QT based applications (such as 
Konquorer, KBabel, K-Word,...) both on GNOME and on KDE..  Contrary to 
my belief, the SKIM wrapper was not needed  to  get  scim framework to 
work.

Here are the two additonal steps you need to take from the steps we had 
discussed in this list few weeks back.

1. Install scim-qtimm from the Universe repository using apt-get command)
 sudo apt-get install scim-qtimm
(or use Synaptic Package Manager or other means to get scim-qtimm from 
universe repo)

2. In the starting script file you use 
(etc/X11/Xsession.d/75custom-scim_ init file or any other file you use 
for scim startup ) make sure the following line is also included (in 
addition to the others needed for gtk based applications)

export QT_IM_MODULE="scim"

Now use scim keyboards on QT based apps as you were doing on GTK based 
applications. I found it to be smooth on KEDIT, Konqueror (using in 
Google search cage) , KBabel (for example to enter name in Tamil in 
project configuration dialog) ..  I understand from a very recent 
discussions in LK_LUG-Sinhala mailing list that Skype is also QT based 
application but I have not installed that yet in my linux platforms.

Only in K-Word I found there is a rendering problem for consonant "im"  
that is "ம்"  


Few weeks ago Ramdass had quoted from scim's  documentation for ubuntu 
at 
http://www.scim-im.org/wiki/documentation/installation_and_configuration/ubuntu_kubuntu 
the following

 > It is useless to export QT_IM_MODULE="scim" because the Qt-immodule 
patch is
 > not applied in Ubuntu's Qt. Therefore, scim (or skim) interacts with 
KDE/Qt
 > apps via XIM protocol.
 >
 >

But I noticed only now in that site that they had clearly stated the 
content in that page was written for old Ubuntu - Warty and Horay versions!

It is a general problem I find with upstream project sites such as 
scim-im and m17n-lib that the documentations are not comprehensive and 
are mostly not up to date!

Well, further to getting feedback from members who would try out on QT 
based apps,  if there are list members who have been using scim (with or 
without skim) already on QT based apps, I would like to have their  
experience based opinions on any problems  encountered  in Ubuntu versions.

~Sethu



More information about the Ubuntu-l10n-tam mailing list