I am trying to find a good virtual keyboard that is in Japanese. there doesn’t seem to be much options for virtual keyboards, let alone one in japanese. The only one I have found is xvkbd, but it is very limited and somewhat glitchy. I tried setting it to Japanese, but all that does is add a button to switch to japanese that you annoyingly have to hit every time you want to enter a character. And not only that, even though the keyboard is in hiragana, it inputs katakana. Are there any other options for a virtual Japanese keyboard, or at least a way to get xvkbd to input hiragana?
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but is there some reason not to use the Japanese language option under YaST? Just by hitting shift+space I can input hiragana and do kanji henkan with the space key.
Hmmm,I don’t know what you are talking about, do you mean switching the default language to Japanese? I have japanese installed but shift+space doesn’t do anything for me. I would like to keep the system in english though, and I am mostly interested in being able to insert japanese in Pidgin and online sometimes.
In gnome (I don’t know how to do it in KDE), if you go to YaST control center under Language you can tick the box for Japanese as a secondary language. Once that’s activated, then 簡単に日本語を打てる。
I did that, but what do I have to do to get it to type in japanese?
Try this
Getting japanese input on US keyboard - openSUSE Forums
or you might find installing ibus more easy. It is newer than scim and a bit easier to install
add the repo
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/swyear:/ibus/openSUSE_11.2
then install
ibus-1.2.0
ibus-anthy
ibus-gtk
ibus-qt
ibus-table
Then run ibus from kmenu and right click on the tray icon to set up your shortcuts to toggle between English and Japanese
@OP – I hope Im not too late to reply, seeing how Im replying to a more than one year old post, but I made an account here to reply because I know how hard it is to find a good virtual keyboard for japanese
I too started learning the language a few days ago and I checked more than a dozen different sites until I found a good one.
So for you and/or for anyone else who stumbles upon this post with the same question, check Virtual Japanese Keyboard (日本語)
Zomiganowai,
The post above, by farcusnz, is where you should begin. I haven’t used ibus, but I regularly use scim. If you would like to try scim, basically you should go to yast/software and install scim (the main program, described as Smart Chinese/Common Input Method), and additionally install scim-anthy.
When using LibreOffice or a webbrowser and you want to type in Japanese, do ctrl-space and it will bring up scim. Scim will start with a bunch of language options, so click on the language box, scroll to Japanese, then choose Anthy (it’s the smoothest Japanese input method.) You will then be able to type in Japanese. When you’re finished, do ctrl-space to go back to a normal keyboard.
I also just did a forum search, and there is a really good post by yamatotakeru, here: Getting japanese input on US keyboard