User:Isaac914/uim/Setting up Japanese Input in UIM

From ArchWiki

This page discusses how to set up Japanese input using the UIM input framework.


You need the following packages to input Japanese.

  • Japanese fonts
  • Japanese input method (Kana to Kanji conversion engine)
  • Input method framework: uim

Japanese fonts

see also Fonts and Font configuration for configuration or more detail.

Recommended Japanese fonts are as follows.

Sans-serif

An opens source OTF fonts developed by Adobe.

Serif and Sans-serif

An open source OTF font set including sans-serif (Gothic) and serif (Mincho) glyphs provided by Information-technology Promotion Agency, Japan (IPA).

If you want to show 2channel Shift JIS art properly, use one of the following fonts:

Input Methods

Anthy

Anthy is one of the most popular Japanese input methods in the open source world. However, it has not been maintained for a long time. Debian succeeds it from May 2010.

Install anthy from the official repositories.

Extra dictionary

Anthy's default dictionary does not include several characters which are not specified on EUC-JP (JIS X 0208) such as "①", "♥", etc. alt-cannadic provides extra dictionaries including those characters.

Get alt-cannadic dictionary and put them under your ~/.anthy/imported_words_default.d.

$ tar jxvf alt-cannadic-091230.tar.bz2
$ mkdir ~/.anthy/imported_words_default.d (if not exist)
$ cp alt-cannadic-091230/extra/*.t ~/.anthy/imported_words_default.d/

Please see official wiki for more detail (Japanese).

Warning: If you will be using this extra dictionary, choose Anthy (UTF-8) for default input method on uim.
Modified Anthy (anthy-ut)

Modified Anthy is a set of patches and huge extended dictionaries which aims to improve the Kana to Kanji conversion quality of original Anthy.

Modified Anthy consists two different upstreams:

  • Patched source of Anthy by G-HAL
  • Huge extended dictionalies by UTSUMI
Warning:
  • Modified Anthy applies to only Anthy (UTF-8). So you have to choose Anthy (UTF-8) for default input method on uim.
  • Modified Anthy does not have compatibility of the dictionaries and learning data with original Anthy.
Compiling modified Anthy using PKGBUILD

Modified Anthy is available on AUR named anthy-utAUR.

Get anthy-ut tarball and makepkg to make and install package:

$ wget https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/anthy-ut/anthy-ut.tar.gz
$ tar xvf anthy-ut.tar.gz
$ cd anthy-ut
$ makepkg -s -i

If you already use original Anthy, you have to convert the existing learning data format.

$ rm ~/.anthy/last-record1_*.bin
$ anthy-agent --update-base-record
$ rm ~/.anthy/last-record1_*.bin
$ anthy-agent --update-base-record

(Though this step repeats the same commands twice, it is not mistypes.)

Anthy Kaomoji

Anthy Kaomoji is a modified version of Anthy that converts Hiragana text to Kana Kanji mixed text and has emoticon (顔文字) and 2ch dictionaries. It can be found in the AUR (anthy-kaomojiAUR).

Mozc

See Mozc.

Mozc is a Japanese Input Method Editor (IME) designed for multi-platform such as Chromium OS, Windows, Mac and Linux which originates from Google Japanese Input.

Though MozcAUR adapts to only ibus input method framework, macuim provides uim-mozc plugin.

Mozc (Vanilla)

uim-mozcAUR is available on AUR.

Note: This does not support kill_line feature of uim-mozc.

You can install this from unofficial user repository. Add the following into your /etc/pacman.conf:

[pnsft-pur]
SigLevel = Optional TrustAll
Server = http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/pnsft-aur/pur/$arch
Note: This repo provides x86_64 packages only now.

And refresh package database:

# pacman -Syy

You can choose install packages specifying group name as follows:

# pacman -S mozc-im

Or, specify package names directly. For example:

# pacman -S uim-mozc
mozc-ut and mozc-svn

mozc-utAUR and mozc-svnAUR can be built uim-mozc.

Note: mozc-ut can work with uim-mozcAUR.

To build uim-mozc, edit PKGBUILD like follow, i,e. uncomment _uim_mozc= line:

## If you will not be using ibus, comment out below.
_ibus_mozc="yes"
## If you will be using uim, uncomment below.
_uim_mozc="yes"
## If applying patch for uim-mozc fails, try to uncomment below.
#_kill_kill_line="yes"
## This will disable the 'kill-line' function of uim-mozc.
Tip: If you will never be using ibus-mozc, comment out the _ibus_mozc= line.
Registering Mozc
Warning: You must run the following command whenever you upgrade or (re-)install uim.
# uim-module-manager --register mozc
Google CGI API for Japanese input

Google CGI API for Japanese Input (Google-CGIAPI-Jp) is CGI service to provide Japanese conversion on the Internet by Google. It can be used on web browser. Its conversion engine seems to be equivalent to Google Japanese Input, so conversion quality is probably better than Mozc.

Note: This service sends/receives preedits and candidates as plain text (as of 2012-09).

You can use it via uim. Choose "Google-CGIAPI-Jp" on uim-im-switcher-gtk/gtk3/qt4 or uim-pref-gtk/gtk3/qt4.