display chinese pinyin tones

[argentina1]

Hi,
I am studying chinese and I am using scim to input chinese characters which works fine.Unfortunately I haven't found a way to display pinyin which is a romanization system for showing how chinese characters are to be pronounced (since from the character itself it is only very seldom possible to derive how it has to be pronounced).

Pinyin works by putting 4 types of accents on top of vowels which describe how one has to lower or raise the voice: e.g. "wǔ kuài qián" or "shālā" (see http://www.wku.edu/~shizhen.gao/Chinese101/pinyin/tones.htm for anybody interested).

When learning chinese it is very important to be able to write these kind of accents. I have tried various keyboard layouts but none contains all the characters required (e.g. chī ). In Windows there is the possibility to choose a special pinyin keyboard layout which will allow one to precede a vowel with a number e.g. (one types w3u ku4ai qi2an to get wǔ kuài qián). Is there a similar way to do this in Ubuntu?

Thanks for your help

Georg

[ChameleonDave]

Using SCIM, you can enable pinyin input. Just go into Synaptic and install everything that mentions pinyin. You should then be able to find it in SCIM's menus.

Generally, the methods with "py" in their name are Han character input methods that use pinyin; the methods with "pinyin" in their name are for actual pinyin input.

Don't use the m17n one though. It's buggy.

Fēicháng róngyì!