Stephen Pitts wrote:- > Hi! I'm trying to figure out what level of Japanese input support exists > in Debian.
Not much to my knowledge, unless you install Debian-jp. > Ideally, I'd like to be able to receive messages written in > Unicode with mutt (via the mutt-ja package), and type messages/documents > in kana/kanji with vim and have them stored as Unicode. I don't think you mean Unicode - I don't think mail is sent in Unicode. Most use EUC encoding with iso-220-jp. I have mutt set up to read and send Japanese. To do this, you need at a minimum the following (there may be something I've omitted): a) Japanese console fonts, and a Japanese console. konfont is the package for the fonts, and kon / kterm (say) for the virtual console / X terminal emulator. b) Japanese patches for mutt. See http://home.sprintmail.com/~kikutani/mutt-e.html These patches apply almost cleanly to the debian slink source (this is the route I took). c) Setting up Japanese input is quite tricky. I use canna, with standard slink emacs20. The various packages for this come with Debian-jp. I haven't got the printing working yet, but I've hardly tried. I think it's much easier than the setting up any of the above. A Japanese Debian book I've picked up points to a package called escpf at http://www.debian.or.jp/prospective-packages.html which I haven't downloaded yet. > Being able to print > Japanese text would also be really nice. I'm a bit overwhelmed by how > all of the packages work together. Do I need kinput2, canna, mutt-ja, > and jvim-canna? Will I need some type of kana/kanji dictionary? Do I > need to 'enable' kinput somehow, perhaps by editing my XF86Config? With canna, one way to do it is to select a key which when pressed with the CTRL key, toggles English / Japanese input. I use the Windows key right by the CTRL key on my standard English keyboard. xmodmap -e 'keycode 115 = Kanji' in .xsession achieves this. emacs20 has its own interface to canna, using CTRL + o. Editing files in Japanese works beautifully, and it's even possible to give files Japanese names. > The English documentation is a little confusing and my Japanese fluency > isn't enough to begin to try and understand the stuff written in > Japanese. Thanks to any and all who can shed light on this for me. I found Craig Oda's stuff very informative about the issues behind a Japanese setup:- http://tlug.linux.or.jp/~craigoda/writings/linux-nihongo/ but the bit about emacs and canna didn't work for me; luckily what was detailed in my book was a tad simpler and did work. If you get close, I may be able to help with the finishing touches. 頑張ってね。 Neil.
