* Mike FABIAN <mfabian@suse.de> [031208 15:45]:
Philip Amadeo Saeli <psaeli@zorodyne.com> さんは書きました:
I am having little problem with the Chinese character input. The problem is including the tone marks required by the pinyin transcription. I've tried wierd latin vowels, but have not been able to find a complete set necessary. I've been using "Insert -> Special Character" in OpenOffice.
Maybe you are using an unsuitable font? You can choose a font in this "Insert -> Special Character" dialog in OpenOffice.
Which characters do you need for PinYin?
Specifically, I needed the vowels [aeiou] with the first and third tone marks above them, which are basically a dash and an upside-down caret respectively. The vowels with second and fourth tone marks could be represented by existing latin-1 chars.
I guess "FreeSans" or "Luxi Sans" have all you need.
Don't know about "FreeSans", but "Luxi Sans" did -not- have all the needed chars. I finally found several fonts (in addition to the Arphic GB TTF fonts) that included the needed chars, which solved part of my problem. The Arphic font I was using ("AR PL KaitiM GB", in OpenOffice) had the needed chars, but they were double wide and hence unsuitable, the rest of the base Latin chars being standard width. For anyone who is interested, the fonts which included the needed chars were (names from the OpenOffice font selection menu): "AR PL KaitiM GB" (full char cell width) "AR PL SungtiL GB" (full char cell width) "Caslon" "Caslon RomanSmallcaps" "Courier New" "Gentium" "Gentium Alt" "New Century Schoolbook" "Times New Roman" I have, for now, settled on the Gentium font for the pinyin chars. The needed chars are scattered about the "Latin-A" and "Latin-B" sections of the OO special character insertion dialog.
so I am forced to use cut-n-paste to input any non-English chars.
You can make cut-n-paste somewhat more effective if you create a plain text file with the characters you most frequently need, display this file and cut and paste from there.
This is certainly more efficient than the special symbol input of OpenOffice where you don't have all the characters you need close together and apparently you cannot keep that dialog open either.
Not being able to keep that dialog open between selections is indeed a big nuisance.
How can I get the compose key to work together with a Chinese input method?
IIIMF is supposed to solve that problem in the long run.
What is IIIMF? Thanks! Phil -- Philip Amadeo Saeli SuSE Linux 8.2 psaeli@zorodyne.com