IBus Hindi inscript Devanagari layout [SOLVED]

[umesh india]

IBus Hindi inscript Devanagari layout. m17n not working in linux mint 18.3 cinnamon version.Only English characters are inputted.

[foberle]

Can you describe how you set up Devanagari? The input method editors in Mint (or I guess Cinnamon) are a bit flaky, but they can be made to work.

The best method is to use System Settings > Hardware > Keyboards, and then select the Layouts tab. For some reason, Mint's keyboard configuration assumes you are selecting a Language rather than a Script, so you will need to choose "Indian" to get what I believe to be the Inscript-standard layout. It would seem that you should be able to choose System Settings > Preferences > Input Method, and iBus is indeed a choice there, but I would leave that alone until it's fixed. The keyboard settings don't actually force any language options, so you should be able to use the Inscript keyboard for any of the many other languages that use Devanagari script.

I assume you know how to switch between keyboard layouts and can see the change in the panel when you do so; again, there is an option to display either the 2 character ISO language code or a country flag - neither of which is appropriate for keyboard settings. I assume that you have a font capable of displaying Devanagari characters, although several are supplied with a stock Cinnamon so I doubt that is your problem.

There is, unfortunately, another bug in Cinnamon that prevents you from setting up more than four keyboard layouts from the panel. If you need more than that, let me know, and I'll walk you through how I handle that.

Let me know more specifics and I'll walk you through what you need to do from there.

[umesh india]

Without adding iBus to input method, m17n works only in the open office . But when iBus is added to the input method, IBus only inputs in English on entire system and software and m17n does not work at all.

[foberle]

Since you didn't answer even one of my questions, I don't know how to help you. Also, since you didn't say, I am assuming you are using the Cinnamon desktop. If you don't know, you can go to System Settings (click on the "head" that's at the end of the panel (on the bottom of the screen unless you moved it) and you'll see it. Once opened, go down to the Hardware section and click on System Info (should be the last item in the Hardware section). If you could tell me what the first two lines say, that could be helpful.

I understand that you want to enter Devanagari characters from your keyboard, and that you can't do that. Please answer these questions:

1) How did you set up your system to do this? Give the steps you took, such as which menu options you chose, etc.

2) Once you finished, what changes do you see on your Panel?

3) If you click on the Panel icon that says "En" do you see a drop down list that includes something like what you set up?

4) What key combination did you set up to switch between English and Devanagari?

5) Just so that I can help you troubleshoot this, which language are you attempting to type; Devanagari is used by quite a number of different languages - Hindi, Gujarati, and so forth.

6) Go to System Settings (once again), then select Applets from the Preferences section. Let me know whether you see something called "Keyboard" and whether or not it has a check mark next to it.

Have a good day.

[umesh india]

I am already using Indian keyboard but I want to use i bus m17n for Hindi Devanagari layout too.

[foberle]

OK. I think you answered in question 5 that you are typing Hindi. It really would help a lot if you would answer any of the other questions.

So let me try with a more basic question:

Is support for m17n even installed in your system? Here's how to check:

Go to your menu and look under Administration for something called Synaptic Package Manager (or you could just type Synap in the search box)

Run this, and enter your password if it asks.

When it has loaded fully, type "m17n" (don't use the quotation marks) in the search box.

Look in the list that appears to see if the box marked "ibus-m17n" is marked as installed - this is indicated by the box to the left being filled in with a solid color.

If it is not marked, then you have no m17n support loaded, since this is not the default that Cinnamon uses.

I would be happy to tell you how to install it from Synaptic (and I'm sure others on this forum would be as well), but I would NOT recommend doing that until you have answered some of the questions I asked previously, since your difficulty might be something far more simple. Installing more changes without knowing the actual difficulty is generally not a good idea and cause other side effects.

Another thing I'm curious about: there are minor differences between the iBus m17n layout and the Inscript layout, but what are the differences that you are concerned with? The current version (which Cinnamon ignorantly calls "Indian") now handles common substitutions/shortcuts like ऐ (on the W key) for (ए + े) and ओ (on the A key) for (आ + े) et cetera. Which characters or character combinations are you missing?

In short, even if you could answer more of the questions I asked in my previous responses I'm not sure I can help - but if you don't answer ANY of them I'm pretty certain that I can't help. If language is an issue, try google translate, or even search out someone who can help, as I don't speak Hindi at all.

Have a good day.

[umesh india]

ibus is installed in the synaptic manager correctly. Showing the panel.
i remove ibus and installed the "Scim" in the Linux Mint 18.3 Cinnamon version for typing Hindi Devanagari (inscript- m17n) through the Synaptic Manager. Scim m17n is correctly inputting Devanagari to the system and all the other places correctly but the big problem is coming that when Hindi is typed, the spacebar of the keyboard does not work and the other keys work. Change the layout to English us, then the spacebar starts working. please help.

[foberle]

I don't know if I can help you with scim, as I have never used that.

One thing I would check though: Are you SURE it's just the spacebar not working??

Devanagari Script is only used for those characters specific to Indic scripts; most punctuation and common characters - such as ( ) . , and the space - are taken from the Latin plane. Therefore if you are not getting a space, can I assume you are also not able to type the parentheses, period, or comma as well? This could likely be an IMPORTANT CLUE, so please let me know.

If you ARE able to type those characters, then I would check to make sure that your font just doesn't have a really small/narrow space (some do!). The way to do this would simply be to change fonts and try it: I would suggest using something like FreeFont, or Arial if you have the Microsoft fonts installed. The best way to do this easily is in your word processor.

If you are NOT able to type ( ) . , either, your installation might be incomplete. You can try the following:

Make sure your keyboard is set to English. Open a terminal (usually by typing LCtrl+LAlt+t). Now type xev. If xev is not installed, it will give you the command to install it from the local repository. Go ahead and do that; it is quite small.

Running xev will display a small white box; move this out of the way of the terminal so you can see what's going on. Once the terminal display stops spitting out messages (which it will do as soon as you stop typing or moving the mouse), tap the space bar ONCE.

You will see two event messages - a KeyPress message followed by a KeyRelease, each of which contains six lines, of which lines 3 and 4 are the most important. The KeyPress resulted when you pressed the spacebar, and the KeyRelease when you lifted your finger off the spacebar. Examine these to be sure you know what you should see for a space. The keysym value of 0x20 in line 3 is hexadecimal for decimal 32, the universal code for a space. XLookupString in line 4 of each message should return 1 byte and even has the space shown in quotes. Now type another single character, such as an A or B to see what happens.

Now the big test: Switch to your Devanagari keyboard layout: xev will spit out all sorts of messages as you do this, but will then settle down again. Now type a single character, such as ल (usually on the "n" key on an English keyboard). In this example, the terminal will show that you typed 3 bytes with that one key (this is Unicode) and the value in line 4 under XLookUpString is (e0 a4 b2) "ल". Now, still with your Devanagari keyboard selected, press the spacebar once. You SHOULD see the exact same two messages you had above, with the 0x20 key shown. If this is NOT the case, you almost certainly have an incomplete installation of scim, so go back to Synaptic Package Manager and see if you can guess which package may be missing. As I said, I'm not sure I can help any further, but report back what you find after doing the above, and maybe I'll spot something.

IF ANYONE USING SCIM with Cinnamon/Mint HAS A WORKING SCIM SETUP, please check your installation to give this user a list of which packages you have installed under scim!!

If all this sounds overly complicated, that's because Mint's support for alternate keyboard layouts is quite buggy. Even though it is sort of derived from Ubuntu and therefore from Debian, both of which handle alternate keyboards better (a relative term only), it has a number of flaws that, while they can be overcome, are quite annoying.

Good Luck!

[umesh india]

After reinstalling the system, first open the terminal to install "IBus", then typing in the terminal sudo apt-get install ibus ibus-m17n m17n-db m17n-contrib ibus-gtk and pressing the Enter button, then typing ibus-daemon -xdr Press the enter button, type setxkbmap and press the enter button and then go to the synaptic package manager and see that libm17n library was already installed. Also installed libm17n-0-dbg, libm17n-0, libm17n-im-config0. Then select Menu> System Settings> Preferences> Input Method> Input method> IBus. Restarted the system. IBus is working on the entire system.

Thank you very much for helping, sir.

[foberle]

You are welcome.

Hopefully, this thread (including your ultimate solution) will help others who have difficulty entering alternate scripts. It's a shame that these things are so poorly documented in 2018.