ring0 » blog

Debian: Japanese (にほんご) support

tags: debian, input, latex, japanese 2011-11-15 01:11 by sre

I’m currently participate in a Japanese course at my university. Therefore I want to be able to input Japanese characters on my notebook.

To do this it’s enough to simply install the package ibus-anthy, ibus-gtk and ibus-gtk3. Afterwards you can switch between normal input mode and japanese input mode via the keystroke combination CTRL+Space.

But I’m a vim user and found it anoying to remember leaving the Japanese mode before leaving the Edit mode (otherwise vim’s Normal mode won’t work correctly). I want vim to take care of that for me, so I added a small function to my vimrc:

" source: http://d.hatena.ne.jp/fuenor/20110705/1309866529
au InsertLeave * call PyIBusDisable()

function! PyIBusDisable()
python &lt;&lt; EOF
import ibus
bus = ibus.Bus()
ic = ibus.InputContext(bus, bus.current_input_contxt())
ic.disable()
EOF
endfunction

Last but not least I want LaTeX support. For this two more packages are needed: latex-cjk-japanese and latex-cjk-japanese-wadalab. After installing the packages there’s an UTF-8 example file showing how it works in /usr/share/doc/latex-cjk-common/examples/CJKutf8.tex.gz.

If you hit any errors it may help to remove ~/.texmf-var. Check Debian Bug #406701 to get more details.