GCIN

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GCIN is a light-weighted multilingual input method written purely in GTK2. It supports both GTK im-module and Qt IM as well as traditional XIM architecture. Although the original target of this input method is for traditional Chinese users, the supported IM table architecture provides wide variety input methods including simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean... as well as many other languages.

One unique feature of GCIN is that the author provides a pre-recorded Chinese text-to-speech function. This can help children to learn the pronunciation of the inputed Chinese characters.

Supported Languages

GCIN supports various input methods, including:

   * Cangjie (倉頡、倉頡五代、標點倉頡)
   * ZhuYin (注音 (傳統選字注音、ㄅ半))
   * PinYin (拼音)
   * Tsin (詞音 (類似「自然輸入法」或「微軟新注音」的智慧選字注音))
   * Intelligent PinYin 智能拼音 (gcin-setup -> gcin 注音/詞音設定 -> 鍵盤排列方式 -> 聲調拼音)
   * Dayi (大易)
   * Array (行列)
   * Character encoding directly input (UTF-32 and Big-5)
   * Easy (簡易, 在香港稱為「速成輸入法」)
   * Japanese (日文) (including kana and kanji)
   * Greek alphabets (希臘字母)
   * latin-letters (拉丁字母) (for French and German... )
   * Cantonese Pinyin (帶調粵拼)

Besides, all the table input method from SCIM are supported via the "scim2tab" utility.

Installation and Activation

GCIN is in the official Fedora repository. One can install GCIN by simply issuing the following command:

 yum install gcin

The configuration scripts in the GCIN package do not work on XO. One can copy ~olpc/.xsession-example to ~olpc/.xsession and put the following line into it. GCIN will then be activated during Sugar start-up. (~olpc/.xinitrc is obsoleted for system image beyond Build 650.)

export XMODIFIERS=@im=gcin
export GTK_IM_MODULE=gcin

Since there's no system tray in Sugar, GCIN can be invoked by pressing the "Ctrl+Space" hot-key. The GCIN bar will appear "over-the-spot". Different keyboard layouts can be chosen from the "gcin-setup" GUI tool from terminal. An "off-the-spot" behavior can also be chosen from "gcin-setup" and define the position of GCIN input window. One can also switch between different IM's from the context menu by right-clicking in the text area.

To activate the GCIN speech function for Chinese, one need to install an "ogg.tgz" from the author's web site. http://cle.linux.org.tw/gcin/download/ogg.tgz

su   # or using sudo directly for develop build
yum install vorbis-tools   # needs ogg123 for playback
tar zxvf ogg.tgz -C /usr/share/gcin/

One also need to enable from "gcin-setup" after audio files installed.

Useful Links

• Author's website in Chinese.
• GCIN user group in Chinese.
• Chinese on XO in English
• Official Cangjie Home Page
• Cangjie Method book in English