iBus-Mozc: New Input Method for Japanese

[areteichi]

*THIS PROCEDURE IS NOT STRICTLY NECESSARY ANYMORE, AS MOZC IS NOW PACKAGED IN UBUNTU BY DEFAULT. BUT USING THE REPOSITORIES PROVIDED HERE MAY STILL GIVE YOU THE UPDATED VERSIONS OF MOZC*

BACKGROUND
Google Japan recently announced on its blog that the Japanese Input Method, which has been in development since last December, is officially out of beta. There is actually an open-source version of this input method called Mozc, and I thought I would share with the community the procedure involved in setting it up since I didn't see any posts related to it.

PROCEDURE
The installation is essentially the same as ibus-anthy, but you first need to add two PPAs in order to retrieve the necessary packages.

The simplest method would be to add the repositories:

ppa:japanese-testers/mozc
ppa:japaneseteam/ppa

The first PPA (Launchpad Link) gives you Mozc packages while the second (Launchpad Link) gives you the updated packages for the Japanese environment. What you will then need to install are:

ibus  ibus-mozc  ibus-gtk

Once you restart, you should then see in the applet menu the keyboard icon. Under Preferences > Input Method, you can add Japanese > Mozc to enable the Mozc input method.

What's new and useful with Mozc is the auto-complete feature as well as inclusion of more 'web' or 'hip' languages that are not found in the previous input methods. I think this is definitely a great addition to the Japanese environment in Ubuntu.

LINKS
Mozc Project - Google Code
Mozc PPA - Launchpad
Ubuntu Japanese Team PPA - Launchpad

OTHER RELEVANT LINKS
(in Japanese) Google Japan's official announcement of the stable release of their version of the Japanese input method
http://googlejapan.blogspot.com/2010/12/google.html
(in Japanese) Google Japan's Input Method Official Website (intro video available)
http://www.google.com/intl/ja/ime/
There is a blog post about this in English:
http://asiajin.com/blog/2010/12/22/g...ortun-telling/
And a comic in Japanese illustrating how Google Japan came to undertake their project (which again is the source of Mozc project).
http://www.google.com/intl/ja/ime/comic/

[abeowitz]

Very cool. Going to try this out!

[xtofu80]

Is there any user forum for Mozc?
So far, I have not found any site where one can ask questions about the software apart from the bug ticket system.

[areteichi]

As far as I know, the project page hosted on Google Code is their official website, and unfortunately there is no public forum or the like aside from the bug tracker.
https://code.google.com/p/mozc/

You could perhaps consider emailing one of the developers if you're having some serious issues. You can find the email addresses on the website.