I am using opensuse 13.1 amd64 kde version of OS on my home desktop. I wanted to know how to enter the data in Indian languages. I have installed font package indic-fonts after which I am able to read the text in most of the Indian languages through web browsers and also other applications. But unable to enter new text or edit existing text.
I tried copy & paste of Indian language text from web browser to Libre office word processor. Only few of the text paste will work fine with few grammatical errors. But copy & paste of Indian Language text from Adobe PDF file to any other application just returns unreadable text. Any advise on this matter will be highly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
There are allways three things you need to handle characters.
you need to be able to store them. Linux is quite capable of storing any UTF-8 encoded Unicode character. They can even be usd filnames.
you need a font to display them on the screen/printer. As it is not realy effctive to have fonts or all the characters that are defind in Unicode installed, you normaly use a subset You increased the default instaled fonts by adding the indic-fonts package, which, as you confirm, should fullfil this requrement for several scripts used in India.
you need a way to enter them. Now my knowledge is a bit weak here. I am certainly able to enter individual characters by pointing to them fom a list (as possible in LibreOfice through IInsert > Special character, or the KDE Special Characters tool (KDE menu > Tools >Accessability >), but to realy input text, you want to use he keyboard. When one does ot have a keyboard that supports the wanted character set, the keyword to search for is “input method” if I am correct. Such a software enables you to input characters by (combinations of) the keys of he keyboard you have. But as said, I have no experience here.
I hope that this may show you a direction.
And I hope of course that someone using this may post here.
Thank you Henk for your valuable suggestions. Out of three points you have mentioned first two were present already, third one was missing.
Finally I found a solution. I have installed IBUS package from Yast and now it works fine. Only issue is the system tray icon for keyboard layout seem to be a gtk app. Not sure if there are any Qt equivalents available. I have noticed that Yast has installed the following packages automatically.
one thing you need to keep in mind with ibus in 13.1 is that it conflicts with libreoffice-kde4 so you will have a pretty ugly looking Libreoffice.
There is an alternative to ibus called fcitx that works in much the same way and has no conflicts in 13.1
If you keep ibus there is a themed KDE icon for systray you can install from yast
ibus-branding-openSUSE-kde
also, ibus is a gtk3 app so to maintain system appearance you should install
Thanks for the timely alert farcusnz](https://forums.opensuse.org/members/farcusnz.html). Just now I have noticed this and uninstalled ibus. Except this issue, ibus was working perfect for me. I tried package fcitx as well. But could not find support for Indian languages.
Is there any other way of taking care of this data input requirement?
> Thanks for the timely alert ‘farcusnz’
> (https://forums.opensuse.org/members/farcusnz.html). Just now I have
> noticed this and uninstalled ibus. Except this issue, ibus was working
> perfect for me. I tried package fcitx as well. But could not find
> support for Indian languages.
Just install back ibus if it works for you.
About the libreoffice problem, you can install the gnome integration packages instead, or live with
the ugly aspect. Ugly, but works. Or so I understand.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” (Elessar))
you need to also install *fcitx-m17n *I believe
also fcitx-config-kde4
I’ve never tested with Indian though so can say if it works or not (but the Indian specific data will be in M17N as it is with ibus)
If you can’t get it going though - do as robin_listas says and just use ibus and libreoffice-gnome
Libreoffice will look just fine but you will get gtk dialogues.
There is a bug report on the ibus / libreoffice-kde4 problem which was supposed to be fixed but the fix didn’t work so it is an ongoing issue.
edit: both ibus and fcitx are currently not as polished in openSUSE 13.1 as they were in 12.3 and require a little bit of work (small tweaks) to get them to the same level as they were previously. I’m sure both will improve with a little bit more time.