Getting Scim Working
You've just installed the Scim and scim-bridge .pet files. You've installed a set of tables from another file. You've found and installed suitable fonts. You've restarted the X server. What now? How to get it actually working? This article goes through the procedure step by step. I use Simplified Chinese as my example, but very similar things will apply to any language.
| When you've restarted the X server and done nothing else yet, this is what you'll see in the system tray area. Of course, you may have other things there in addition to those shown in the screenshot. |  |
| Open an application that will work with Scim, such as Geany, and the Scim icon (arrowed) appears. |  |
| Press control-space and the Scim panel appears at the right-hand end of the system tray area. |
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| Click on the keyboard icon (not the "SCIM" logo) and a list of language options appears. Exactly what you see depends on which tables you have installed. In this installation, scim-m17n and scim-pinyin are installed. Only a part of the list is shown (to keep the image to a reasonable size). Some languages have more than one option, as is the case with Simplified Chinese, shown here. |
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| I select smart-pinyin (from the scim-pinyin .pet file), the last entry on the list. Now the system tray looks like this: Some of the symbols shown in the panel are sub-menus for setting different options. These will vary from language to language. |
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| At this stage, it should be possible to enter text. Begin typing in your chosen language. Some languages do most of their work behind the scenes, so to speak, and you'll just see characters appearing on the page. In the case of Chinese, shown here, a dialogue box appears. You can use the up and down arrows to move along the list of choices,and then press tab, spacebar or return to select it to the document. Or just hit the number of the choice you want. |
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Note: if these images are hard to see, use the "view image" function in your browser for better definition.
This covers the basics of using Scim. If you want more detail, especially with using a particular language, you'll need to consult someone who knows that language.
See also: MultiLingualPuppy
Categories
CategoryAdditionalSoftwareCategoryMultilingual
