How to input Chinese in FC3

[mpolo]

I've now fiddled a bit with IIIM and SCIM, and perhaps my experiences will be helpful to someone.

IIIM is Fedora's official input method. This means that it is very easy to get the necessary RPMS and install them. For my purposes it had one major disadvantage. It completely overrides the standard XIM, meaning that even when you don't have an IM active, the dead keys on your keyboard won't work. The solution to that is the im-unitle package, but I had problems because I am forced to use Outlook under Wine (corporate network that doesn't have the Outlook web interface active yet), because Wine applications only see the standard XIM. That left me typing in non-English languages without any accents at all, which was not satisfactory. Even in Linux-native applications, the im-unitle interface is somewhat suboptimal if you are already used to the dead keys "just working" -- you have to hit the dead key and then select the accented character from the menu, at least since the last update of unitle (before you could successfully type 'a and get a á), which can really slow you dow
 n if you are accenting u's and such.

SCIM works as an XIM, which means that in Wine applications, your dead keys will still work normally. The fancy inputs of Japanese and so on don't seem to make it into the XIM layer, but at least the dead keys are alive. On the negative side, it is a bit of a problem to get all the right packages. Some were available as RPMs, others were .tar.gz s. Worse, the standard scim FC3 package provided at http://www.scim-im.org/ does not include devel headers, and no devel package is available. I had to uninstall and then rebuild the .src.rpm to get a proper -devel package, which was needed to add m17n-lib support, for Eastern European languages. With a little bit of patience and knowhow, it was possible to get it all working, of course. It probably would help if I could read Chinese or Japanese, since a lot of the tutorials are in those languages. http://home.no.net/david/i18n.php provides a lot of good information about how to get it running, despite the Gentoo slant.

Mark


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