If you wish to write chinese or japanese characters you usually have to rely on IME engines through typing pinyin or equivalent.

There are however three projects out there that can ease things a lot, letting you write those characters simply with a pen and/or a tablet: Tomoe, Tegaki and Zinnia.

Tomoe

Tomoe is a SCIM addon. Once installed you could activate it by right clicking on the SCIM/SKIM tray icon and select handwriting recognition.

website: http://tomoe.sourceforge.jp

ubuntu setup packages are kindly provided by Ubuntu Japanese Team PPA:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/japaneseteam/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main #Scim Tomoe

The main drawback is that the dictionary is automatically selected according to current locale. This prevents Tomoe from working if you have an interface other than Chinese or Japanese one since on-demand language switching is not implemented yet.

You can, however, override this by manually setting the scim-tomoe locale each time you execute it from the terminal (for instance unless you have a chinese/japanese locale the tray icon menu would be useless)

LANG=zh_CN scim-tomoe

or

LANG=ja scim-tomoe

Tegaki:

Screencast video: ogg or youtube.

website: http://www.tegaki.org/

Tegaki uses Zinnia engine and Tomoe character templates.

Support in Ubuntu karmic 9.10 is not complete since two dependencies are missing. You can however use debian debs:

http://packages.debian.org/sid/python-tegaki

http://packages.debian.org/sid/python-tegaki-gtk

these packages need to be installed forcing unment dependences:

sudo dpkg -i --force-all python-tegaki*

then install the remaining available packages from the ubuntu repositories

sudo apt-get install scim-tegaki python-tegaki tegaki-zinnia-simplified-chinese

Just remember:

scim/skim is default Input Method for Ubuntu/Kubuntu CJK users.

－ scim and scim-gtk2-immodule are installed by ubuntu-desktop.

－ skim and scim-qtimm are installed by kubuntu-desktop.

－ Defaulted IM engine module(s) (ie, scim-chewing, scim-pinyin, scim-anthy, or scim-hangul) is installed by language-support-* (ie, language-support-zh, language-support-ja, or language-support-ko) for CJK languages.

－ im-switch is installed by language-support-*.

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