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Thread: iBus and Traditional Chinese - a no hoper?

  1. #1
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    Angry iBus and Traditional Chinese - a no hoper?

    What's the current situation with iBus development? Is it just me or is the support for traditional chinese characters terrible? I live in Taiwan and it's a real deal-breaker for using linux. At best, I get mixed lists of traditional and simplified if I use one of the bewildering variety of pinyin input methods, most often i get the dreaded 'no input window'. 'bopomo' often just writes raw bopomo into the input line, rather than making it into characters. lots of programs don't even seem to accept iBus input.

    I've googled 'linux ibus chinese' and read and digested the hits I got from this, and looked at the hits that 'ibus chinese' brought me on this forum, and nothing seems to improve the situation. The odd glitch would be fine, but iBus seems to be 98% glitch, and 2% hit.

    What's going wrong? I'm using the package that comes with the distro and I've added support for traditional chinese. What have I done wrong? Is iBus fundamentally broken as far as non-mainland chinese goes?

    A small additional point that may not be related - when I'm using iBus, the contents of the clipboard occasionally dump themselves at the cursor as I'm typing. Has anyone else noticed this? Like I said, it might not be related to iBus.

  2. #2
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    Re: iBus and Traditional Chinese - a no hoper?

    I can't actually help you, but I just wanted to tell you that I'm having the same problem. I just can't figure out how to get the actual characters to display.

  3. #3
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    Re: iBus and Traditional Chinese - a no hoper?

    and I've added support for traditional chinese.
    How did you do that? Did you do this by first selecting the traditional Chinese language support and enabling fonts and iBus (System / Administration / Language Support)? Or do you mean that you simply enabled support in the iBus preferences pages?

    This link gives the general idea but you may have to slow down and think it through since this clip rushes through.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvIobt5JpXI
    Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
    Mahatma Gandhi.

  4. #4
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    Question Re: iBus and Traditional Chinese - a no hoper?

    I've done everything that it is in the video many times. But I still can't get the actual characters to show on screen, all I get is the phonetic characters. For example, if try to type "strange" (because, well, this is strange), instead of the actual characters, I get: ㄑㄧˊㄍㄨㄞˋ. Please note, however, that Chinese does display fine. If I have a file, website, calendar item, contact, you name it, in Chinese, the characters display fine. I just can't type them.

    Once again, as the original poster stated, is the problem with traditional Chinese? The video shows simplified Chinese, and is using Pinyin as an input method. I -- and he -- want traditional Chinese, and I am using BoPoMoFo (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) as the input method.

  5. #5
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    Re: iBus and Traditional Chinese - a no hoper?

    Sorry, just saw a reply in my earlier post and realised I was using the wrong input method. Everything works fine now.

    Thanks to all who helped.

    eccomaggio: Have you had any luck yet?

  6. #6
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    Re: iBus and Traditional Chinese - a no hoper?

    Yes, it seems traditional chinese support in SCIM and IBus is terrible. My chinese friends who tried it can't imagine any chinese using Ubuntu.

    How does Android and Apple (also linux or similar) do it ?

    This what seems to be recommended: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvIobt5JpXI
    Activate "traditional chinese" in iBus, then choose in iBus your input method. We can choose 『速成』 or 『速成三代. But both are very bad. Quick (m17n) is even worse.

    We also installed the package "scim-tables-zh" and "ibus-table-quick" which gives some extra bad choices.

    More info here: http://wiki.ubuntu.hk/w/Install_Ubuntu_desktop#安裝倉 頡/速成輸入法

    We are still trying and experimenting. Please keep us informed about your progress.

    I don't know where we can get help for this important issue. Would Canonical know there's a problem ?

    I once heard of a professor in Hong Kong who made the table for the very good windows quick-package-tables. Should be easy to mutate them to linux.

    Heeeee-eeelp !

  7. #7
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    Re: iBus and Traditional Chinese - a no hoper?

    balkan:

    I'm having no problems with Traditional Chinese on my machine. My problems before were down to the input method I was using. Being in Taiwan where they use BoPoMoFo that's what I thought I needed, but an earlier poster suggested using Chewing and that has worked fine.

    Where do you live? I'm pretty sure BoPoMoFo (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) is only used in Taiwan, so if you're not living here, the problem might be down to your input method and not iBus. To reiterate, that's the problem I was having before. Once I changed the input method, I realised the problem was my input method and not iBus (or Ubuntu or Linux for that matter).

  8. #8
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    Re: iBus and Traditional Chinese - a no hoper?

    Quote Originally Posted by eccomaggio View Post
    A small additional point that may not be related - when I'm using iBus, the contents of the clipboard occasionally dump themselves at the cursor as I'm typing. Has anyone else noticed this? Like I said, it might not be related to iBus.
    I'm afraid I can't help with your situation on chinese characters but I think I now what's causing this. It's a feature not a bug. If you hilight some text and middle click in a text buffer it will copy the text. It's much faster than usinng Ctrl-C Ctrl-V so just check you aren't clicking the middle button.

    Also now I think of it, if you absolutely can't get the chinese characters to work consider filing a bug at launchpad. www.launchpad.net I think a bug affecting an entire language pack will get a bit of attention (but I could be wrong).

    Angus
    Last edited by da burger; June 22nd, 2010 at 06:23 PM.

  9. #9
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    Re: iBus and Traditional Chinese - a no hoper?

    @Wenfuli: I actually can't write or read much chinese, but my chinese friends that I'm trying to help know even less about computers.
    We're in Hong Kong, so if you mean 酷音 (Chewing) - 智能注音輸入法, then it's not usefull to us cantonese speakers because it uses pinyin.

  10. #10
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    Re: iBus and Traditional Chinese - a no hoper?

    @balkon:

    I think I spelled your name wrong the first time! Sorry about that.

    When talking about what they use here, I'm actually referring to 注音 (Zhuyin) and not Chewing, but Zhuyin is often referred to as BoPoMoFo when Romanised, so that was what I assumed I needed, but as I said, what I needed was Chewing. Everything seems the same between the two except that BoPoMoFo doesn't give me actual characters but Chewing does.

    You are right, though, in that since you are in Hong Kong that neither one will work for you. Zhuyin and Pinyin are basically the same, the difference being that Pinyin uses Roman letters and Zhuyin uses symbols that are much like Chinese characters (and Zhuyin is much more accurate). In the end, both input methods require one to know how the character is pronounced in order to type it. I have no idea how people in Hong Kong type Chinese, but since you and I would be using the same characters but with different pronunciation (Mandarin vs. Cantonese), neither Zhuyin nor Pinyin would work for you. So I, at least, can't help you out, but wish I could.

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