Ian Lewis' Blog

Here are some new Japanese words I just stuck into Anki.

Vocab in tab separated values for importing into Anki: vocab1.tsv

I recently started using Anki to keep track of and study Japanese vocabulary.　I didn't like it much before because it wasn't easy to edit your deck of cards and it didn't give very much control over your deck(s). But I've recently given it another try and have grown to like it. It's simple and shows some nice graphs and statistics now in an unobtrusive side panel.

A few things bother me though. Like how it's written using python-qt. Not that I don't like QT but none of the applications that I use have a QT interface so I had to install like 40 packages. And then on top of that Anki requires that you have python-qt 4.2 (4.1 will not work) and Ubuntu doesn't have a package for that yet so I had to install python-qt and sip from source.

That by itself isn't so bad but even after installing all that Japanese input doesn't work. It seems that ubuntu has problems with QT and SCIM and with python-qt in particular. Even after trying some steps that z0r from #nihongo on freenode wrote up I still couldn't get it to work.

I eventually got Japanese input working in Anki. This is what I did:
* im-switch -s scim_xim
* added "/SupportedUnicodeLocales =
en_US.UTF-8,en_GB.UTF-8,en_AU.UTF-8" to ~/.scim/global
* Disabled "Embed Preedit String into client window" in scim-setup
* Changed QT var to: XIMInputStyle=Over The Spot

I still have scim-qtimm installed, but I guess it's not being used.
$QT_IM_MODULE=xim by default.

As a bonus, it seems to work in emacs now too. But I mustn't have my
fonts configured correctly for it, because I get boxes instead of
Japanese text. Additionally, my tilde key works again! Some GTK apps
don't seem to work as well with the new settings, but I'll keep testing
it.

I still wonder whether there could be improvements made to Anki, given
that Kedit worked with pretty much every configuration. In particular,
Anki required Over the Spot and no preedit string while kedit is happy
with either. I wonder if that was the only thing I needed to change? If
I continue to have trouble with GTK apps I test scim again (instead of
scim_xim).

Even if I did get it to work it would reduce ALL applications to using a floating window to display the pre-edit string for Japanese input which is ugly. I hope that the issue gets resolved soon but since ubuntu only releases new (non-security-related) updates on new upgrades of the whole distribution, it's not likely to be fixed for a few months at least.