[Software] IBus Chinese Pinyin

[RodrigoBH]

I'm using Debian 12. I've installed ibus-pinyin and ibus-libpinyin, then run ibus-setup, and in the Input Method tab, I'm looking for Chinese language or Pinyin input.

When searching "chin", the only result is Achinese (why the A?) which, once clicked, show a list with Indonesian, Malay and Javanese. No Chinese at all.

When searching "piny", there is a Pinyin result which, once clicked, show only two different options for Cameroon (?!). No China.

There's no Zhongwen or 中文 or Hanyu or 汉语.

Where is the Chinese Pinyin?!

[ruwolf]

They are independent and ibus-pinyin is deprecated.
Try to purge ibus-pinyin.

[pwzhangzz]

Ibus is tightly integrated with gnome. If you are running gnome DE, after you installed ibus-pinyin and/or ibus-libpinyin, you can go to gnome settings, click on "keyboard" and add Chinese (intelligent pinyin), which corresponds to ibus-libpinyin, or Chinese (pinyin), which corresponds to ibus-pinyin, as your Chinese input engines.

I don't know how to input Chinese characters in other DE's. I know quite a few native Chinese speakers who are using Chinese locales and have no problem inputting Chinese characters in xfce and KDE. However, these features were enabled during system installation. With GNOME, adding Chinese input engines in non-Chinese locales is quite straightforward.

[RodrigoBH]

They are independent and bus-pinyin is deprecated.
Try to purge bus-pinyin.

Thank you! Purged ibus-pinyin, and now Chinese appeared, with Intelligent-Pinyin as input method.

However, the keyboard shortcut didn't work until I added Chinese to Input Sources in the general keyboard settings as well. And even then, the key to change input language is Super+Space, even though I changed it to Ctrl+Space in ibus-setup. The whole thing is somewhat confusing. Do you know if there's an up to date instructions page anywhere?

[RodrigoBH]

Ibus is tightly integrated with gnome. If you are running gnome DE, after you installed ibus-pinyin and/or ibus-libpinyin, you can go to gnome settings, click on "keyboard" and add Chinese (intelligent pinyin), which corresponds to ibus-libpinyin, or Chinese (pinyin), which corresponds to ibus-pinyin, as your Chinese input engines.

I don't know how to input Chinese characters in other DE's. I know quite a few native Chinese speakers who are using Chinese locales and have no problem inputting Chinese characters in xfce and KDE. However, these features were enabled during system installation. With GNOME, adding Chinese input engines in non-Chinese locales is quite straightforward.

Thank you! Yes, I'm running Gnome. Please see my previous reply. I don't think it's that straightforward, since I couldn't find an instructions set anywhere, that is not deprecated (like the wiki).

[pwzhangzz]

From my own experience, ibus-pinyin and ibus-libpinyin ("intelligent pinyin") can co-exist, but both can only be configured (again from my own memory) via GNOME settings. Ibus-pinyin is super snappy but has been deprecated in that it has not been actively maintained for many years and there is a serious bug that causes it to be essentially unusable (I had filed a bug report but apparently it went to the never never land). Ibus-libpinyin has a unique feature that it can cache English vocabulary and is very easy to switch between traditional Chinese (used in Taiwan) and simplified Chinese (used in mainland China and probably everywhere else). But many of the improved features and bug fixes are available only in Sid. I have been told to use ibus-rime (中州韻); it has a very powerful vocabulary (for both Chinese words and phrases) which has been pre-arranged according to the use frequency and is constantly updated. However, configuring ibus-rime can only be done (as far as I know) by editing the various yaml files and it can be very confusing (at least to me). Since I don't have to do the configuration, ibus-rime is fine for me.

[pwzhangzz]

Many years ago, as part of their effort to develop OpenSolaris (I was involved), Sun developed a, at that time, state-of-the-art Chinese input method called "sunpinyin" (its original author/inventor has a PhD in comsci from the venerable Tsinghua University). One of the best features of sunpinyin was that it allows "whole sentence Chinese input" (整句输入）. This feature was later, at least to some extent, implemented in ibus-pinyin and ibus-libpinuyin. But now ibus-rime can do even a step better. As shown in the following screenshot, I can output a relatively complicated sentence (12 Chinese characters) with only four English letters:

Of course the vocabulary needs to be trained a priori, but it doesn't take much effort to train a competent vocabulary. Or, theoretically and hopefully, we should be able to buy one in the future.