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#1 2017-10-13 09:16:58

oui
Member
Registered: 2017-09-02
Posts: 305  

how to use input for complexe writing?

Hi

as my user name indicate, I am a French man. but I would like to use my computer to re-learn languages I did begin to learn as I was young. this was depending on the country I am dealing with (India, this as well Hindi as Tamil, China, Japan, Korea etc.).

before the computer did become common in the private houses, we did learn sometimes only with romanized books, sometimes with the correct writing  although this has been a long process! in some countries the own language was less used with other peoples than English, and at the time from telex machines, the transcription did often change. later came letters in hand writing (Chinese, Japanese) at the time later of telefax. the first Windows system were completely different in Far East versions and different from country to country etc. No way to process correctly the writing of such languages...

I am looking now for the possibility to catch up lost time and inconvenience.

but as I am not specialist I have difficulty to select the best input system offered in Debian / Devuan / Ubuntu distributions for such persons being absolutely no native readers/writers!

- most compact as possible (one of my portable PC has really very low hard ware resources (low RAM, small hard disk, very old 64 bit CPU, very slow, the other not but I don't will to have to accustom me to one input method on one PC and to a completely different on the other)
- easy procedure to change the language WITHIN a document (especially in spread sheet with rows etc. in for ex. my mother tongue, next in Chinese simplified, next in Korean etc., for Hindi and Tamil no problem as it is possible to use "setxkbmap" in an opened little terminal window)
- easy to install / start deamon / add languages and fonts (I prefer fonts remembering writing with brush as I did myself learn a lot of signs really writing them with pencil and ink, including special simplified and bound hand writing in case of Chinese or Japanese! I recognize the signs easier, I did look, if I use such fonts like "ungunseo" in Korean. I need only one font for each language if it reproduces pencil hand writing!

My usual keyboard layout is: us intl (my hardware belong that layout on it).

I use neither KDE nor Gnome and would prefer not to have to use LXDE/LXQT etc. (to spare resources on the old poor 10 y. laptop emachines...)!

What can you recommend to me?

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#2 2017-10-13 11:16:50

FOSSuser
Member
From: Surrey/Hants border UK
Registered: 2016-12-11
Posts: 167  

Re: how to use input for complexe writing?

If you can change the keyboard/screen font to your required country/language, & your data shows in that language, then use the 'Save as' menu option to create another version of your document/spreadsheet, which should then have the characters of the language you were using, in the new saved copy.

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#3 2017-10-13 13:49:21

oui
Member
Registered: 2017-09-02
Posts: 305  

Re: how to use input for complexe writing?

Thank you very much for the very fast answer FOSSuser.

Saving is not the question, the question is input! Input Far East language need

input methods

and, for European people, a lot of courage as the most howto's are written in the divers language herself!

the most Linux distributions offer some input method (else SliTaz, although being one of the smallest Linux distro; SliTaz offers it for one of the named language probably because a user did build an adequate package. but for the other nothing, and how the community or alone person using is using it seems not to be described or the howto seems difficult to find.

I hope that Devuan has users living in Far East and able to explain a bit how they do using Devuan of course (I am really using Devuan since last month as my main linux installation!)

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#4 2017-10-13 15:41:58

MiyoLinux
Member
Registered: 2016-12-05
Posts: 1,323  

Re: how to use input for complexe writing?

Hi oui. smile

I took French in High School; unfortunately, I don't remember much of it.

Moi livre est un piscine. LOLOLOL!!! (I probably completely messed that up, and I'm missing accent marks).

For non-French speakers...no, I won't tell you what I said. big_smile

Anyway...I don't know if it will help, but there is a package called gxkb. It will allow you to have three different keyboard layouts available at one time. It will sit in your system tray, and by clicking on its icon, you can change keyboard layouts quickly. If that's something that you think you would be interested in, I can give you more information on how to choose which layouts are used.


I have been Devuanated, and my practice in the art of Devuanism shall continue until my Devuanization is complete. Until then, I will strive to continue in my understanding of Devuanchology, Devuanprocity, and Devuanivity.

Veni, vidi, vici vdevuaned. I came, I saw, I Devuaned. wink

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#5 2017-10-14 02:37:39

GNUser
Member
Registered: 2017-03-16
Posts: 570  

Re: how to use input for complexe writing?

Hello, oui. I used ibus for years, but was annoyed by some buggy behavior and now I only use a python/bash script I wrote. The script allows you to use custom two-character combinations to trigger unicode characters (e.g., a` triggers à and c; triggers ç). One could expand the script to also have 3+ character triggers if this were necessary.

You just install the handful of dependencies, customize the script with your unicode characters and triggers, run the script, and start typing. Script changes nothing on your machine and leaves no trace when you stop it from its taskbar icon.

I realize that for a language like Chinese something like my script isn't going to work given that you'd need to define triggers for thousands of unicode characters, but depending on the language (e.g., for French) it might be a nice option.

https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=1639

Last edited by GNUser (2017-10-14 13:16:34)

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