Birgit Kellner
I've just subscribed to this list, but noticed that there is a related thread going on right now, about adding Japanese language capability.
I went through Mike Fabian's pages (http://www.suse.de/~mfabian/suse-cjk/suse-cjk.html), but either I missed out on some parts or I didn't understand things properly.
I have SuSE 8.2 personal installed, using KDE. I installed canna and kinput2. I would like to type Japanese text in OpenOffice and also in Web Browsers (Konqueror and Mozilla). The system should not run entirely in Japanese; it should be possible to switch from German to Japanese keyboard with hotkeys in the same session - ideally.
As you use German and Japanese at the same time, I recommend to try to work in UTF-8 because both German and Japanese (and more) can be encoded in UTF-8. If you use the legacy encodings like ISO-8859-15 (only usable for German and other European languages, not for Japanese) and EUC-JP (only usable for Japanese and English), you will be switching locales and converting all the time, which is very inconvenient. Set the following default values in /etc/sysconfig/language: RC_LANG="de_DE.UTF-8" RC_LC_CTYPE="ja_JP.UTF-8" # this is to enable Japanese input by default ROOT_USES_LANG="yes" You can also use export LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 export LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8 in $HOME/.profile.
(I've just migrated from Windows a few weeks ago, so my thinking about these things is still rather Windows-ish, I'm afraid.)
Also, I have user-specific .Xmodmap-configurations designed to facilitate input of certain Unicode characters from the Latin Extended Additional ranges, and these should remain usable.
That is no problem, I also have stuff like that in my ~/.Xmodmap, this works.
I also tried setting Japanese as additional language in KDE's control center, but I can't add Japanese in the locale "Germany" that I've selected, and when I activate "Enable keyboard layouts", the user-specific .Xmodmap doesn't work anymore.
Yes, if you use .Xmodmap, you should not touch the KDE keyboard settings.
From what I've read on Mike's pages, I understand how I would configure the system to run completely in Japanese, that is, how the X server would start up with Japanese as the basic locale. However, I don't yet get what I have to do to have Japanese input enabled as an alternative configuration that can be activated from within the same instance of X.
The important thing is only that the value of LC_CTYPE is some
Japanese locale. This triggers the automatic start of the XIM server
kinput2 during the start of X11 and it enables Japanese input via
XIM.
I.e. both LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.eucJP and LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8 enable
Japanese input. ja_JP.UTF-8 is much better if you also use German.
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Mike Fabian