Pidgin meets Microsoft IME Japanese: a few tips

I’ll be doing some posts for those of you who haven’t moved over completely to Linux or BSD. Or for those who are used to the free software applications available on the typical Linux box, but find themselves stuck with Windows for some reason.

Just a quick walk-through setting up the Japanese environment on WinXP and friends, for a starting point. I’m using the standard install of WinXP Home that came with my laptop, which I’ve been playing with lately, having just restored the original o.s to a new drive. Nothing special, just a few clicks:

Control Panel >> Regional and Language Options >> Languages

And click the box for “Install files for Asian language support”.

Simple! I leave the various logout/login/reboot cycles up to the reader. To get Japanese input, go back to Languages and click the “details” button under “Text services and input languages”, to add the input methods you want for the various CJK languages. Then some more logout/login/reboot as necessary. It really does use the two-hundred-thirty megabytes of disk space, as promised.

Now I have the MS IME with “EN” (for English) showing in my taskbar. I click it to see my input options. When I need Japanese, I choose “show language bar”. I have my input mode set to hiragana, and I can flip between romaji and kana input with left-alt-shift on my US keyboard.

This setup can be used with firefox 3 and pidgin im, among others.

Now on to some Free and Open Source Software.

Pidgin im works fine with this system, with a few config setting changes. For input, right-click in the message area and select Windows IME under the ‘input methods’ menu. That allows you to write and see kanji. I don’t know if you need to change your default font to a Japanese one like MS Mincho or MS Gothic. It works for me with or without changing the font in Pidgin preferences.

There’s a slight glitch in displaying Japanese from others using legacy operating systems (like Windows 98 Japanese edition) and im clients. The easy way to deal with that is to go to:

Tools >> Preferences >> Conversations

and uncheck ’show formatting on incoming messages’ to fix displaying kanji on incoming messages. You might need to also change your font for conversations in pidgin preferences. It depends how broken your buddy’s software is (does it use Unicode fonts and proper encoding?), and probably also on the chat protocol. I’ve been chatting on msn this way with friends on Win98 Japanese Edition and an ancient msn client.

This is just a rough run through, of course. Feel free to leave comments here relating your own experience with pidgin. I should mention I found  the ‘disable formating’ tip here and on another guy’s blog post about using Chinese with pidgin and MS IME, which I can’t seem to find at the moment.

Next Time:  Firefox with MS IME (Hint: it will be short, unless, perhaps we get into some mojibake issues with Web 2.0 type annoyances).

And now for something completely different…

I’ve been off the grid a bit these last few momentous days. After detoxing from a steady stream of CSPAN, MSNBC, FOXNEWS, and all the rest for a while, I’m back to my usual level of procrastination. Now we’re all speculating about who this new president will bring with him, and whether or not the political climate will be different enough to have any tangible effect beyond the oohs and ahs of this honeymoon period. The optimist in me wants to say something will change, has changed already, just to get the new guy in there.

It was great to hear the UFO conspiracy crowd going manic explaining to George Noory the implications of having a new president for finally getting the truth out on the government UFO cover up. Hilarious. I can’t wait. As soon as he gets us out of two wars, defeats terrorism while restoring respect for The Constitution and international law, solves the credit crisis, revives the economy…THEN maybe we’ll get to the bottom of this flying saucer business. I hope the kids get to adopt their puppy first.

Next time: My Windows IME explorations with free software.

Election Day

Ok, been a while since I’ve posted. Getting mentally prepared for any result Tuesday night. In other news, I’ve signed up for National Novel Writing Month. There, I said it! Feel free to harass/cajole me to keep at it.  I’m way behind already, of course.