Gerhard Schuck
First a small bug: If you activate kinput2 with Shift-Space you should be able to write in Japanese (of course started with LC_CTYPE = ja_JP and correct XMODIFIERS setting) directly, but you can't. You have to change manually to the Japanese font first.
I don't think this is a bug. Japanese input immediately works, i.e. the indicator window pops up and you can enter Japanese, but of course it is not correctly displayed when you use a font which doesn't contain Japanese characters, then you just see boxes.
And back after you have deactivated kinput2.
You don't have to do that if the font you use for Japanese also contains all the other characters you need. Most Japanese fonts contain at least ASCII as well, i.e. you can continue to use the Japanese font for English if you want. Some fonts like Bitstream Cyberbit or MS Arial Unicode contain most of Unicode 2.0, i.e. you can continue using such fonts for German as well if you like. If you want a different font style, you have to switch fonts of course, that can't be helped. [...]
OpenOffice doesn't work well with kinput/canna (which one I don't know). Quite often they crash. One example: If I press HOME the "auxiliary control" window opens. Normally I can close it with Ctrl-g or backspace. Only backspace works correctly. If I press Ctrl-g the window closes, but kinput/canna don't work anymore. Sometimes OpenOffice crashes after about 15 seconds (enough time to safe your file). This happens with several other combinations too.
I tested the German and the Japanese versions of OpenOffice on notebooks with SuSE 7.1 and 7.3 (later I will also try it on my desktop with SuSE 8.0).
Add the following to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Kinput2
!! Don't give input focus to the windows of kinput2, they don't need input focus
!! it just causes problems if they get input focus.
!!
!! For example, if you use kinput2 with Canna and open the 'auxShell' window
!! by pressing the 'insert' key a window pops up where special symbols
!! can be selected. If this window gets focus, the selected symbol will not
!! appear in the application until the application gets focus again. This is
!! quite confusing.
!! And there are even some applications where the selected symbol will never appear,
!! not even when the application gets focus again. Gvim currently behaves
!! like that and XIM in Gvim may even become completely unusable after one of
!! the kinput2 windows got focus, making it necessary to restart Gvim to be able
!! to use XIM again.
!!
!! I found no reason why one of kinput2's windows should need input focus.
!!
*SeparateConversion.input: false
*selectionShell.input: false
*auxShell.input: false
and restart kinput2 (restart X11 if in doubt). This solves the problem
you describe.
These app-default settings are already included in SuSE Linux 8.0, but
not yet in 7.3 and 7.1.
--
Mike Fabian