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Reading/Writing Chinese Using Linux?
Rimbo asks: "I'm building a computer for a friend, who has three major requirements from his system: He wants an Athlon with a 333MHz FSB, he wants absolutely no Microsoft software anywhere near it, and he needs the ability to read and edit Chinese. I imagine Red Flag Linux has great Chinese support, but is it as easy to use as a desktop OS as Mandrake or Red Hat? How easy is Chinese text editing and entry under the major distributions? What "office" software for Linux is good for editing Chinese? Thanks!"
Google is your friend.
m l
http://www.ibiblio.org/mdw/HOWTO/Chinese-HOWTO.ht
Abiword has good i18n support, and I'm almost positive I've seen a screenshot of Abiword in Chinese. I'd also imagine that GNOME 2 would support Chinese pretty well if properly configured, thanks to all the new Pango/Unicode stuff..
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
All operating systems that support Chinese/Japanese/Korean use an IME allowing a user to input in characters using a standard 101/104 key keboard.
All 3000+ kanji in japanese and 20000+ in chinese can be input using a keyboard.
For chinese though, this is difficult due to the number, which is why MS Office is winning people over with the voice input system.
I only say this because the default install, when selecting Japanese as the primary language, worked right out the box for my wife. She's had no complaints (she actually loves the speed improvement over Windoze), although cannaserver, etc don't work exactly like windoze, but she picked it up quickly. Even the man pages are in Japanese. Need an English man page, simply do a
and you're in bidness.
I say all this GUESSING that the support for Chinese in Redhat will be just as good, if not better, as the Japanese support.
Oh, BTW, Abiword does do internationalization. As does Mozilla, Sylpheed (this thing rocks!), gqview. The basics are covered, but you probably already knew that.
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
The chinese how-to will tell you what most of the software does. It's at the usual place - http://www.tldp.org.
Mandrake comes with
1. chinese input (both big5 and gb) with xcin.
2. cjk latex for editing (if you already know how to use latex, of course)
3. mozilla is big 5 (gb?) aware already
4. there's a chinese shell somewhere on the disk
5. emacs works with big5 input without xcin.
Fonts, locales and even some manpages and howtos also comes with the distribution. The only thing I haven't got working is actually displaying chinese in the title bars and window manager toolbars.
Unfortunately, Win2K support for Chinese input is not nearly as good as their support for Japanese. The Chinese IMEs are all keyboard-based, and quite frankly not up to the level of, say, TwinBridge.
At the very least, Microsoft needs to update their Win2K Japanese pen-based IME to support the rest of the Asian character sets.
There are commericial Japanese IME packages for linux that are supposed to be better then the free ones for serious usage. The ones I know of are: Atok X,Wnn7, and VJE-Delta. I have never actually used any of these however so I can't comment personally on them but they are supposed to be much better(then the free alternatives). Now considering that Linux is used much more widely in China and is supported by the government there, I would think there are some fairly competetive input systems available
You mean something like the Gnome Keyboard Applet?
They were one of the first general Linux distros with DBCS support and the product has simplified and traditional Chinese support.
All 3000+ kanji in japanese and 20000+ in chinese can be input using a keyboard.
well acttually japanese has way more than 3000 but there are 3000 that are the ones you are expected to know from a typical grade school...
my japanese teacher advised everyone is her class to download JWP (japanese word processor)... even though she only cares about what works i found it interesting that this "wappro" is released under the GPL... w00t... i know this is a bit off topic but i can say from personal experiance that it is possible to use a normal english 101/104 keyboiard to type in kanji... i dont use linux for this but im sure there are other that can do it
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
No, there are many Chinese input methods that utilize the normal qwerty keyboard. Some methods uses the sound of the character which are usually slower. And some uses the composition of the character structure to work (these are usually faster).
It's ignorant to think there's a need to have thousands of keys....
BTW, there's an input method created by Ericsson (I think, correct me if I am wrong). It uses only 9 keys on the phone keypad for input. I have used it and find that it's a little slow but it works and able to type in all characters that I wanted. Works kinda good for such a small device.
And for those of you that are wondering, YES, it takes a few key stroke to make up one character. But it is not slow to represent some meaning on the keyboard. Chinese is regarded as one of the most concise language on the planet. A few keystoke would be compensated by much shorter sentence.
I'm using Debian with working Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
Basically you have you sort out locale packages, fonts, and then inputing method (XIM), and lastly the apps you want to use chinese.
For locale, most distributions include proper and working locale packages. So all you have to do is install them. Locale packages are related to glibc btw. The way locale packages work has changed a bit from glibc 2.1 to 2.2. But anyway both work well.
And then for fonts. Most of the time, you need both X fonts (.bdf files) and truetype fonts. Both are quite easy to get on the net if your distribution of Linux doesn't include them. They are all in Debian, for example. And I think a chinese distribution like RedFlag will include a bunch of them.
For chinese, I use xcin for inputing. It supports big5 and gb encoding, and also all sorts of common inputing method, such as changjei, bopomofo, cantonese, etc. There are also people developing custom inputing method you can use with xcin, such as smartcj
Finally, applications to use. To start with, I think it's a must to have a terminal which works with the language you need. For example, I have crxvt (chinese rxvt). And so I can run all sort of text based programs with chinese working straight away.
Most of the time all you need is to do:
export LANG=zh_TW.Big5 XMODIFIERS=@im=xcin
for your environment. Run the inputing method, and then run your applications. Most applications will work pretty well with XIM.
For office software, I've tried Openoffice.org only, with inputing working. Sometimes it is buggy, but usable. As long as you have truetype fonts installed and Openoffice.org knows about those fonts, you're sorted. Printing works straight away too. While, Staroffice doesn not work properly with XIM, for some reasons.
I haven't tried any chinese linux distribution, but I imagine they might be even much more easier to setup for chinese.
Just a note for Japanese and Korean. I have kinput2 with canna server, kterm for Japanese. hanterm and ami for Korean. Both kinput2 and ami work with Openoffice.org, too.
If you have the source, you have the whole world...
If you want fairly good Chinese support I think you can try Turbolinux 7 - they are bigger then Redhat in China because they have a much better chinese input method support and stuff - and I have tried it myself! You can switch between chinese and english just like that!
If you just want Japanese support and keep english dialogs and menus use:
Actually, in an A7V333 with a Palomino Athlon-XP, the FSB is still 133 Mhz. The ram runs at 166Mhz DDR, hence the 333 moniker, but the ram and the processor's FSB are asynchronous with each other.
11*43+456^2
I have set up a Chinese environment under Debian - it works beatifully, easily better than any Chinese input/output system under Windows. The key ingredients:
/etc/locale.gen includes the zh_CN GB2312 line (or equivalnet Big5 traditional encoding) and run locale-gen
* KDE 2.2.2
* ttf-arphic-* true type fonts (traditional and simplified are available)
* XCIN, with a little tweaking to get it working properly - does Pinyin input, which most people prefer
* locales - make sure your
* environment variables - there is a Debian Chinese HOWTO which tells you what you need to set.
The key thing is the fonts (turn on anti-aliasing in KDE, make sure your X windows is set up to support this). The Arphic AA fonts look utterly magnificent, easily the best chinese fonts around. KDE supports X input (i.e. XCIN) quite happily, so you can use KOffice etc. and type in Chinese without a problem.
One of these days I'll get around to writing a HOWTO to explain exactly how it works - if you want details, pester me by e-mailing daniel at ieee dot uow dot edu dot au.
I am at this moment using Red Hat 7.0 with CLE,
the Chinese Linux Extensions, version 1.0. For
Chinese in console mode, it has jmcce; in X, both
KDE and GNOME have been pretty thoroughly
localized, though I prefer mwm and rxvt. Chinese
input is no problem with a standard keyboard;
there are more input methods than you can shake a
stick at. We also bought the Hancom Office suite.
Made for Asian languages, and more to my tastes
than StarOffice or anything else I've seen.
yes google is your friend
but please people just use unicode for everything
you just have to have an editor that will do unicode and have your fonts set up right (since their is no free unicode set that would be hard) I use xemacs so what do I know
regards
john jones
What is Unicode?
Notwithstanding all the "Linux trolls" who post "search Google" and "Here's a Chinese input project, it must be good," Linux just can't do Chinese (or Japanese) now.
Let's put this in perspective. I've been Microsoft-free personally for about 5 years now. Both my laptops and all my workstations (at home and work) run Linux. That's about five machines running Linux now. I'm very happy.
My wife knows nothing about computers. She doesn't know Windows, she doesn't know Linux. So I can install Linux for her, right? Wrong.
Because Chinese input for Linux simply isn't as good as Microsoft Win2K.
As the parent points out, the Microsoft Asian-input methods are well-thought out. They allow you to seamlessly shift into and out of English and Chinese (and Japanese).
Chinese itself has at least three major input methods, each of which is a long, complicated process to implement. My wife reads/writes "Traditional Chinese" (what they read/write in Taiwan) as opposed to "Simplified Chinese" (what they read/write in China and what Red Flag Linux certainly only supports).
Microsoft Win2K handles all Chinese and Japanese input methods so well that my wife and others who are actually from Mainland China are all happy.
Linux doesn't seem to make anyone happy.
Sure, there are projects out there. As the Linux Troll with a highly-rated comment mentioned earlier, "Search Google!" -- yeh, you'll get tons of hits, and every one of them will be a waste of your time.
Maybe in another year or two.
I'd be happy if someone who's actually used Chinese input on Linux and Win2K tell me there's something as good for Linux. I'll try it in a heartbeat. I've been waiting YEARS to get my wife off of Windows.
Note: All this rant doesn't say much about Chinese *OUTPUT* -- Linux seems to display Big5 (traditional) and other Chinese/Japanese just fine. It's the input that's not ready yet.
fifth sigma, inc.
There's a new input method system called Internet/Intranet Input Method Framework (IIIMF). It was released to the free software community by Sun just over 2 years ago. Currently it's hosted at Li18nux.
Among its advantages over the old X Input Method (XIM) system are:
Disclaimer: I am a voting member on the Li18nux Steering Commitee, and I'm also working on a commercial Chinese IIIMF input method for my employer.
I am a Chinese Linux user. The RedFlag, in actually, is a kind of Red Hat clone under GPL. Their main work is to just "rewrite" the Redhat installer with Chinese string, and replace the string "Red Hat" to "Red Flag" at the booting time. Other works include set language to chinese and pre-install some software like VCD player with chinese patch etc... There is not any good technology contribution to Linux... quite disappointed.
Chinese office ? Ah, there is a simliar thing, a "Chinese" distribution of OpenOffice. They changed the menu font to Chinese...etc. They said they have sorted the Chinese font warp/indent problem. That is
Most of the true linux users in China are using the linux distributions as same as the other users in the world: Redhat, Debian(few people use it), Mandrake(this one is quite welcome) and Slack.
One of the problems related to Chinese is about font rendering and font library. People usually use a M$ OEM font called simsun.ttf, which has included in the Redhat 7.3. However, when the font size 15, for displaying, the XFT should be disabled because rendering the Chinese chars under small font size will make them blur & unclean. XTT is a good alternative choice, but it lacks the large font support...:(
The Chinese input method problem totally is not related to technology. One of my classmates are working for a software company. The have developed a fantastic input method making Chinese input as fast as English's. However, they denied to develop a Linux version becaue of two reasons: Linux=no money profit/OpenSource (But their software price for windows just about 1 pound / 2 US.D) the second one is quite ridiculous: from the team leader to developers, all of them are Visual Studio/MFC slaves and HATE Linux... .
you can put that memory bandwidth to good use. Normally, the asus board , using the via kt333 chipset, runs the fsb at 133MHz DDR and the memory bus at 166MHz DDR (if you have PC2700 memory). In order to get that extra memory bandwidth to the cpu, you have to increase the fsb clock to 166MHz DDR. If you're not into overclocking you cpu 25%, then you have to lower the clock mulitplier to compensate. The asus board offers a 1/5 clock divider for your pci bus so all your other devices can run in spec. Have fun :).
P.S. The MHz stuff.
MHz only means millions of cycles per second. Exactly what that means depends on how you define "cycle". If you're using the accepted definition of a cycle, in terms of memory, then you're talking about a cycle bounded by the event which occurs every time your bus does this:
_
/ \_/
(I'm not the best ascii artist but you get the idea) and the memory bus operates at 166MHz. However, if you're calling a cycle the event that occurs every time the bus can put a bit on a data line, then the memory bus operates at 333MHz. Either way, you're still going to get a maximum throughput of 2.7GB/s.
P.P.S.
If you want to change your fsb from 133MHz to 166MHz then you have to get a cpu with a rated frequency into which 166 will divide nicely. That means the XP 2000+ (1666MHz) or the XP 1500+ (1333MHz). If you get any other processor, you'll have to overclock or underclock a little since the cpu multiplier can only be set to multiples of 1/2.
I have used Linux combined with Chinese enviroment for a long time. I always think Gnome is the best, it is fast, flexible and easy to use. There is a trick. If you are not used to read Chinese menu, tool bar and prompt, you can change the locale setting from zh_CN.GB2312 to zh_CN in RedHat or Mandrake. You still can use Chinese, but menu and the other things will be English. It is very convenient.
.deb from debian website if you use debian.
I use Openoffice 1.0 for a while, it is great and very easy to add some new truetype fonts and utf8 fonts. And it is compatible with Chinese XIM(like Chinput). If you think Openoffice starts very slowly, you can download ooqstart-gnome from rpmfind.net or
Have any problem, e-mail me at river@linguistic-alchemy.com