Chapter 5. Characters in Each Country

42

LANG=ja_JP.ujis

(used to be major for Linux)

LANG=ja_JP

(because EUC JP is the de facto standard for UNIX; not recommended)

LANG=ja

(because EUC JP is the de facto standard for UNIX; not recommended)

LANG=ja_JP.jis

is used for ISO 2022 JP (aka JIS code or JUNET code).

LANG=ja_JP.sjis

is used for SHIFT JIS (aka Microsoft Kanji Code).

Setting LANG is not sufficient for a Japanese user who has just installed Linux to get a mini 

mal Japanese environment. There are several books on establishing Japanese environment on

Linux/BSD and magazines on Linux often have feature articles on how to establish Japanese en 

vironment. Nowadays many Japanized Linux distributions which are optimized so that many

basic software can display and input Japanese are popular. Debian GNU/Linux has

user ja

(for potato) and

language env

(for woody and following versions) packages to establish basic

Japanese environment.

5.1.9 Input from Keyboard

Since Japanese characters cannot be inputed directly from a keyboard, a software is needed to

convert ASCII characters into Japanese.

WNN

,

Canna

, and

SKK

are popular free softwares to input

Japanese language. Though

T Code

is also available, it is difficult to use. Since these adopt

server/client model and implement their own protocols, we cannot input Japanese only with

wnn

,

canna

, or

skk

(and their depending packages).

In X Window System environment,

kinput2 *

and

skkinput

packages connects these protocols

and XIM, which is the standard input protocol for X. Kinput2 also has an original protocol and

kterm

and so on can be a client of kinput2 protocol. Kinput2 protocol was developed before

international standards such as XIM (or Ximp or Xsi) became available.

On console, there are no standard and each software has to support wnn and/or canna protocol.

For example,

jvim canna

,

xemacs21 mule canna

, and emacs20 with

emacs dl canna

or

emacs dl wnn

. Thus the ways to operate are different between softwares.

skkfep

provides a

general way to input Japanese on console.

Then the way to input Japanese is explained.

Since almost Hiraganas and Katakanas represents a pair of a vowel and a consonant with one

character, we can input one Hiragana or one Katakana with two Latin alphabets. A few Hiraganas

and Katakanas need one or three alphabets.

Kanji is obtained by converting from Hiragana. There are many Japanese words which are ex 

pressed by two or more Kanjis and almost recent converting softwares can convert such words

at a time. (Old softwares can convert one Kanji at a time. You must be patient to use this way.)