GTK+ and UIM for Japanese language input

[ramin.honary]

I've been working on this one for 2 weeks and still have no clue what I am doing.

The Universal Input Method daemon (UIM), installed nicely and I can launch the daemon, configure it using "uim-pref-gtk" to use "anthy" (a common Japanese input method) and even get the little toolbar to a appear when I launch "uim-toolbar-gtk". But no matter what I do, whether the toolbar indicates it is in "anthy" mode or "direct" mode, absolutely NO Japanese text appears. I suspect that the window manager I am using (awesome-wm) isn't very friendly with uim. I have got it working before, but I don't know what I did or why it doesn't work anymore.

The reason I am starting this thread is because I want to learn more about UIM. How does it capture keystrokes from X11? How does it send/receive information from GTK+ and Qt? What could I possibly do to debug it or to track it's processing? Could I compile it with "gcc -g" and use GDB to watch it work? Would that tell me anything?

There is very little information about any of this that I could find from Google.

[ramin.honary]

(bump)
Here's an update: I can now get UIM to work properly, but only after a very long delay. I may begin an X session and launch UIM via the ".xinitrc" file. Then I simply have to wait about 15 or 20 minutes and my input mode will suddenly change without any warning while I am typing. After that happens, I can use it normally.

Again, I am using the "Awesome" window manager. I like tiling WM's. Are there any "Awesome" users out there who might have any ideas?

Anything could be helpful, like are there any error logs I should check? Are there ".rc" or config files I should check?

[lycurgus-3]

seems i'm a little late replying here :P

if you're still having trouble, i hope the following helps.

i'm also using Awesome (i too like tiling wms), under Arch. under guidance from another forum post somewhere, my UIM works pretty much flawlessly, having done the following steps:

1. install the packages scim, scim-anthy, anthy, and uim
2. add the following lines to .initrc:

export GTK_IM_MODULE = uim
export QT_IM_MODULE = uim
uim-xim &
export XMODIFIERS = @im = uim
uim-toolbar-gtk &

before the final 'exec awesome' line.
3. restart X (with ctrl-alt-backspace)

when X restarts, you should see the uim toolbar in the corner of the screen. if you set the leftmost field to 'anthy', and the second-from-left to 'hiragana' (which will be shown as ひらがな), you should have japanese input with no problem.

to get back to regular input, you'll need to set the second field from hiragana back to the one with the hyphen (unfortunately i can't read anything next to it other than "mode" :S )

hope this is of help to either the original poster or someone else