Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

As stated in title..

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

It displays east Asian languages just fine.
But it doesn't come translated in any of the languages, and you cannot input east Asian characters without additional software (which is not available right now).

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

There is a ukeyboard package that might support this, but this package is in Extras-Testing and IS NOT MEANT FOR NORMAL USERS AS IT MIGHT DAMAGE YOUR DEVICE, as long as it has not reached the "Extras" repository (next step after having received enough testing).
So you have to wait a bit... and again just to clarify: This is not officially supported.

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

do you know what script is that on? is it Devanagari?

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

Because I will get N900 soon so just to be clear here..

"N900 will definitely display East-Asian Languages" Such as music files name , photos files name etc..?

I really need to know it for certain cuz I dont want to spend a lot of money for a phone that cant even read/display East-Asian Languages.

Iam disappointed in Win-mobile because of this issue.

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

If the text is encoded in Unicode, yes. If not, the browser can probably switch codepages (would need confirmation from someone that has an Nx00 device).

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

Might be worth to MERGE this thread with http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=33956 .

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

Adding display support for an unsupported language just requires to install the appropriate fonts. Chinese and Japanese and maybe some others are preinstalled on the device. Thai fonts are available now and can be installed separately.
Advanced users can even take the TrueType fonts from their PC and copy them onto the N900.

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

But im not just talkn about browsing the web page u know. Im concern about the ability to read and display the file's name which contain East-Asian language character/alphabet/fonts/letters u name it.

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

Right, and on Windows and Linux all filenames are (properly) stored in Unicode. Unicode filenames and such will show up.

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

Not in Winmo.. they dont have multi-languages localization so it wont display any other languages apart from the OS language itself.

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

Right, WinMo != Windows. It's a nasty work-alike with the same name slapped on it. To make WinMo display/input anything other than english it takes a bit of work. I managed to bash WinMo 4.3 into working with Japanese, but it was flaky.

Maemo runs the same Linux that your desktop PC can, which uses UTF-8 systemwide, I suspect that display will be system wide and problem free, while input projects are currently in progress.

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

Yeah, the input is not a big deal for me. Not having it im ok, having it im very happy.

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

some people are working on ibus for N900.

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

How do I install Thai font exactly? Need help here.

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

here's another thread specifically for Korean.

Seems N900 can display Korean for both file names and Web browsing.
But I'm not sure how to go about getting it to work once I take it out of the box.
(I'm still waiting for my N900 to arrive from Amazon......)

Also, is getting Korean/Japanese input to work using the hardware keyboard really difficult to do on N900?

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

I am using N900 to view Chinese and Japanese webpages and it works just fine. But there is not yet any way to input chinese (except perhaps using a website dictionary and ctrl+c, ctrl+v).

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

mscim appeared in devel-extras this evening.
i installed it and its deps (mscim mscim-modules-table mscim-tables-ja) and it works great!

there is a configuration app in the n900 settings.
ctrl+space changes input methods.

mind that this disables the SYM key and virtual keyboard functionalities, just like on the 810 =\
anyone know how to easily get to the extra symbols (specifically the pipe |)?

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

hallgreng, I also found it today by chance and installed it on my N900, but I couldn't make it work. Ctrl+Space does nothing... I installed the same packages you wrote on your post, and even restarted the device... do you know what could be missing or wrong?

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

hm, no i dont know what the problem could be.
i rendered my tablet unbootable last night (be careful when remapping keys!) and just reflashed and then reinstalled those listed packages, it works fine for me without any configuration (tested in an xterm immediately after install/reboot).

are you holding the Ctrl/Sym key when you press Spacebar?


it would be really nice to be able to launch the Sym menu. i mapped | to the 'sterling' key, but i miss []{} etc...
also its dangerous as hell to mess with the keymappings. i was trying to map a fourth-level keypress differently than its third-level and that left me unbootable.
anyone have an idea to get to the extra keys in the virtual keyboard?

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

I got the fonts for Cambodian installed on mine and it display quite well. But would be nice if someone could porting KhmerUnicode from windows to Maemo 5 would be nice. So I can type Cambodian on my device :D

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

Yes, I am. And I tried this on several applications...

About the SYM key... it's an known issue and should be fixed in a couple of weeks. The only current workaround is to uninstall mscim. :( More info in the issues section of the project: http://code.google.com/p/scim-for-maemo/

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

at a terminal type:
ps faux | grep scim

and make sure that the scim daemon is indeed running.
it should return this:

thats GREAT news about the Sym key! scim broke it (as well as sticky Caps/Alt) on the 810 -i didnt think anyone cared =]

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

I already uninstalled it. Since programming on the N900 is for me a much higher priority than entering Japanese text (at least for now), I'll wait for a fix and try again later. Thanks for helping, anyway! :)

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

Last week I gave CJK on maemo another try.

I installed maemocjk-him-scim-anthy on my N900 (PR1.2), but it wasn't working. :( There was no icon in the application menu or in the settings, and there was no "scim" or "anthy" process running, even after more than one reboot...

I even run (from console) imscim and scim-setup, but it also didn't work.

The only change I could notice after installing the package is that the virtual keyboard is not working anymore.

I noticed that the file /etc/gtk-2.0/gtk.immodules should be replaced by a command in the /etc/event.d/scim script, but even after running the command manually, the file is overwritten with the original contents and dated as "Dec 31 1969" after a reboot.

Does anyone have any idea of what can be wrong?

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

Answering myself (just to help someone in the same situation):

My phone battery died and, after booting and selecting UK as the default region, SCIM started working! According to Kimitake, SCIM works only when you select US/UK English as the 1st language, so maybe something was different in my configuration... Anyway, if you need more tips, visit the posts and read the comments on his blog here, here and here.

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

Thanks Ricardo, finally got it working!
mamemocjk-him-scim-anthy is a good solution to my japanese dictionary woes, but not a perfect one. I have a couple of remarks/questions:
1. GUI of anthy looks a bit "off" on my N900, some buttons overlap, etc. It seems that the GUI has been designed for some other resolution, and hastily ported to N900. Can it be changed? I might have a go since I've done some GTK programming, but only on Windows, none on N900. Any opinions, where to start, how difficult would it be, etc?
2. Is there a way to use anthy without having to close the HW keyboard?

Now, related to the reason as to why I need japanese input (learning japanese!), I would appreciate very much if somebody could advise me about this:
1. Which dictionary would you recommend for Japanese? I am using MStarDict, with JEDict, I'm but not entirely happy with the verbosity of entries and with the size of vocabulary.
2. Is there some software for searching kanjis, based on radicals (e.g. like at jisho.org), or by a direct input?

Many thanks!

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

Gjiten (warning, extras-devel) is a good japanese dictionary, it even has search by radical, if you want to give handwriting a try, install Kanjipad too (isn't on the repositories, so you'll have to find an armel .deb)

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

EBDict is good if you have EPWing dictionaries in the proper format, though it's UI isn't exactly great on the N900 outside of EasyDebian.

Also:

- The SCIM method is very much a statically sized window, and would need a rework for Maemo. Placing it in the status area would probably be a good idea. I don't think that would be too terribly hard, but if you're going for that then reworking the config dialog is probably in order as well.

- In all oddities, for me it works great with the hardware keyboard. I can hit ctrl+shift to switch between English and Japanese input. The only problem is eventually the text input loses focus and I have to flip out and back into the program for it to recatch. It also kills the hold for the blue arrow (->) key, and disables the symbol menu completely when in a program that has the IM module active.

I'd love to see more hands on this project, as I'm going to Japan for 2 weeks in August and would love to have fully functional input by then :)

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

Did I help in any way? You're welcome... but the irony of it is that it is not working anymore for me, and I can't imagine why! :confused:

I'll second fwrnando's suggestion about Gjiten - it's a bit buggy, but still very good.

About kanjipad... I'll try this later.

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

Bumping old topic.

I tried installing MSCIM today
- mscim
- mscim-bridge-agent
- mscim-bridge-client-gtk
- mscim-bridge-client-qt4
- mscim-modules-table
- mscim-tables-ja
- mscim-tables-symbol

The interface is better than maemocjk-him-scim-anthy and I don't have to close the keyboard first to enter the input mode. Lost the virtual keyboard, but I can live with it. Lost the symbol vkeyboard, but there's workaround (mscim-tables-symbol ?).

The problem I had is, in the kanji transform mode, it seems to be unable to recognize many input, such as the half-sized characters (ぁ, ぃ, ぅ, ぇ, ぉ, ッ) and the voice with two characters (しゃ, しゅ, しょ, etc).
In addition, the input method seems to only transform per kanji only, so words with more than one kanji need to be typed one by one.
BTW, is there Anthy for MSCIM ?

But searching, most other users seems to have problem with the virtual keyboard missing instead of kanji recognizing, so something I missed when installing ?

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

There is a full CJK input for Maemo working already, if you're willing to do copy/paste - it works for any application.

I've compiled GNU Emacs for the N900 long time ago, as per: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=37242

It shows how the input for Japanese, Chinese, Korean works in it, you can type anything in Emacs, and then paste it into any N900 app... Also, has many many other languages, Tibetan... you name it.

Copy/Paste might not be most elegant, but using Emacs is super great in itself, and it's super fast, the CJK input as compared to any IME you might wanna use on the N900, which is gonna slow you down...

Give it a try, if you're interested...

Re: Will Maemo support East-Asian Languages?
 

This setup seems to work with Chinese far more than Japanese. I ended up removing it and installing the maemocjk-him-scim-anthy package. I'd love it if they were unified, but most of the work was done on these almost a year ago.

My workaround, as a whole, was after installing made sure the environment variable "GTK_IM_MODULE" was not set on bootup, which lets me keep my symbol table (since SCIM isn't catching it) and instead the handful of applications I use regularly in Japanese (mostly EBView) I use with a startup script that sets it, and lets me type in Japanese directly into the application (I hit ctrl+space to flip between English and Japanese.)