X Input Methods

For entering text in CJK languages, simple keyboard typing is not adequate. Instead there are programs that run and handle the conversion of keystrokes to characters these programs are called input methods.

I have tested FontForge with two freely available input methods (as well as one can who speaks neither Chinese, Japanese nor Korean) kinput2 (for Japanese) and xcin (for Chinese).

There is reasonably good (English) documentation on installing and using kinput2 on the mozilla site, and at suse, kinput2 has the interesting complexity that it requires yet another server to be running, generally either cannaserver or jserver. It looks to me as though it might be possible to use a chinese or korean jserver with kinput2 but I have not tried this.

There is good Chinese and English documentation on xcin at the xcin site in Taiwan (english is not the default here, but it is available about 3 lines down).

One of the most difficult problems I had in installing these was finding the appropriate locales. I could not find them in my RedHat 7.3 distribution, nor could I find any RedHad rpms containing them. There is a good supply of Mandrake locale rpms (named locales-zh* for chinese, locales-jp* for japanese, etc.) but Mandrake stores them in a different directory so after installing them I had to copy them from /usr/share/locales to /usr/lib/locales. The SUSE docs imply that the current SUSE distribution ships with these locales.

To start fontforge with an input method you must first insure that the input method itself is running. For kinput2 do the following:

$ cannaserver &
$ kinput2 -canna -xim &

While for xcin:

$ setenv LC_CTYPE zh_TW.Big5             (or $ LC_CTYPE=zh_TW.Big5 ; export LC_CTYPE )
$ xcin &

Beware: Different systems will have slightly different locale names (sometimes it’s zh_TW.big5, or something else) so if things don’t work try something else.

Once you’ve started your input method you must then start FontForge. You should set the LC_CTYPE environment variable (or LC_ALL or LANG) to the appropriate locale. You may (if you have multiple input methods running that support the same locale) need to set the XMODIFIERS environment variable to the name of your method (xcin can have multiple names, it prints out the one it is currently using on start-up).

$ setenv LC_CTYPE ja_JP.eucJP
$ setenv XMODIFIERS "@im=kinput2"
$ fontforge -new

FontForge will start up significantly more slowly when connecting to an IM, just be patient with it. FontForge supports OverTheSpot input in textfields and Root input in the font and outline character views. Not all textfields accept unicode input, but any that do should now accept input from an IM.

Note

This only works if X_HAVE_UTF8_STRING is defined – an XFree 4.0.2 extension (ie. not on solaris)

If you are interested in the mechanics of XIM programming I refer you to O’Reilly’s excellent Programmers Reference Guide for X11, chapter 11.