I need Chinese-typing programme for Windows 2000 and Linux.

[Battosai]

For Linux use SCIM - it does traditional and simplified as well as pinyin and cantonese.

http://www.scim-im.org/

as linux is very flexible you can set the SCIM bar to display the options in Chinese or English or Japanese or whatever...

[marcel]

Thanks for your reply, Battosai.

I did discover scim., but I don't know how to set the scim bar to display in English. Can you advise me?

Many thanks.

Marcel

[Battosai]

It depends :

which distro are you running?

what your default language?

[marcel]

Hi Battosai

I'm using Puppy Linux 1.0.9CE.

My default language is English.

Thanks for helping me.

[Battosai]

To be honest , I don’t know anything about puppy. In the new Ubuntu (6。06 Dapper Drake ）SCIM works perfectly out of the box in a CJK session, it was quite easy to configure in Fedora and if remember correctly pretty straight forward in SuSE as well.

Did you install SCIM ? What kind of package manager puppy uses? If you can install the Debian package I recommend it as it worked out of the box for me.

I don’t know how knowledgeable you are with Linux, please excuse me if my post insults your intelligence. In an English session you need something called im-switch. To run the im-switch you need to find out your locale. You do that with the command :

locale | grep LANG=

. The answer should be something like :

LANG=en_AU.UTF-8

(in this case the locale is en_AU as it is set for Australian English) . To run the switch just go :

 im-switch -z en_AU -s scim 

(replacing en_AU with your locale).

Scim will become your default input system and will display in English. Try it and let me know . I suspect puppy does not have im-switch .

This only works for GNOME , I don’t know what desktop environment puppy uses. If it uses KDE then you need to use SKIM instead of SCIM , I don't know if the im-switch works on KDE. If it’s its something else like XFCE then you will need to check the scim website. There are some general instructions HERE

[marcel]

Thanks Battosai. I'll try your suggestions.Puppy linux uses jwm, but I'll try to find a way to do it. If succeed (I'm not linux guru - a not-quite-beginner!) will that give me the ability to input pinyin and get the appropriate Chinese character?

[Battosai]

Yes , SCIM has everything, pinyin , wubi, fanti, jianti ,cantonese and even shanghainese (not sure , but one of SCIM's many input systems is called 吴 so it might be for wu ,haven't explored it...)

I'm afraid that my instructions are GNOME specific , yesterday I tried to run them on KDE and it didn't work. If you compile from source then you would ,of course ,have no problem...

I highly recommend the new Ubuntu - its Chinese support is great and almost everything works out of the box with very little CLI work.

Good luck ...

Edit : it does work on KDE

[Hero Doug]

Note: When you say uses PinYin, I assume you mean you typ in the pinyin to find the chinese character, not display pinyin.

Ok, for Windows I've been seeing a lot of suggestions for NJ Star, or Chinese Windows. Rather then shelling out money for Nj Star, or re-installing Windows, you can just go to your control panel -> Regional and Language Options -> Languages -> Supplimental Language Support (Install files for East languages). You may need the Windows XP cd though.

Once that's done, go to the same place, and click on the big button at the top that says Details, add an input language and keyboard layout. It works fine for every Chinese person I've seen using a computer, and it's free.

[Battosai]

Hero Doug, you are right . Sadly , Windows' default pinyin input system is not great , to say the least.

If you must use Windows I suggest using the Ziguang Pinyin system created by ChingHwa University- it's Free and has both Traditional and Simplified as well as Japanese Kana, it's very easy to use.You can get it here

(to download click the bottom part where it says "点这里下载-> 宿迁电信2 [本地下载]" or "点这里下载-> 下载地址1 [远程下载]" depending on whether you are inside China or not)

[Hero Doug]

I haven't tried any of the other solutions so I can't really compare, I just didn't think re-installing windows was an excellent choice when you just need to change a few options.

Maybe I'll try using Nj Star for a while and see how I like the difference.