Hello everybody :)
I'm a long-time Mac user, also Mklinux user, so I'm delighted to have
both together in Mac OSX. However, I've been very ill/disabled for a
long time now, and most of what I used to know about computing has
leaked out my ears, and is still leaking, so that limits my options.
In particular, I don't remember, and can no longer learn, much about
Unix. However, I still try.
I've been trying for some time to get Kbabel installed, since I
translate for the open source community whenever I can.
LocFactoryEditor is an excellent Mac-native translation app, but many
of my team-mates use Kbabel, and I need that option.
I had hideous problem installing it via fink, but eventually
succeeded, using fink unstable and my current OS, OSX 10.4.1.
X11 boots OK, then Kbabel, but I can't input my Unicode Vietnamese
text at all. (I can input it perfectly in the Mac GUI.) I have set
the preference that is supposed to respect the system keyboard, and
evidently X11 is seeing that choice, because it isn't inputting the
"normal" characters that would be input if I used my English
(Australian) keyboard.
The Unicode Vietnamese keyboard, like many layouts that involve
accents, uses "dead keys" to give the instruction to prepend or
append the accent. Vietnamese uses accents big-time: it's a tonal
language, so effectively we have 72 vowels, distinguished by the
accents. Since these diacritic marks are combined, we are a test case
for Unicode support. However, an app or system which has Unicode
display problems of the kind that our language is likely to expose,
will actually try to input the accents, and will get some of them
wrong, misplaced or missing. With X11, _none_ of the added accents
display.
When I hit the "dead key" which should give the instruction to add
that accent to the next vowel typed, I get a space immediately,
instead of a vowel plus accent when I type the next vowel. For
example, a grave accent, as in the Latin-1 character è, is created by
hitting the number 5, then the accent. If your mailer supports
Unicode (and this hasn't been messed up in transit), this following
character, done by typing 5 and e, should look the same: è.
When I type that in X11, I get:
e
space plus e, no accent. So three grave e's should look like this:
èèè, but in fact look like:
e e e
and a space is input instead of any added accent. This completely
disables input in X11 for me.
I don't think it's only a Kbabel problem, or a KDE problem, because I
can't input in xterm either.
I'm sorry for the long explanation: I hope it's made sense. I would
really appreciate any help with this. I posted about this on the Mac
OSX Hints X11 forum, but nobody responded. :( I know Unicode support
isn't trivial: I've helped debug several apps. for Unicode support,
and I had to sort out why the original Mac OSX Unicode Vietnamese
keyboard didn't work consistently (long story: I ended up doing a
page online about how to get your OSX inputting and displaying
Vietnamese correctly). I'm happy to work with someone on this, or to
do what reading and learning I can in solving it.
Thankyou for any help you can offer.
from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm
Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN
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