HOWTO : Traditional Chinese Handwriting on Ubuntu 10.04

Traditional Chinese handwriting is available in Linux now. Tegaki Project provides Traditional and Simpified Chinese as well as Japanese handwriting input for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. It is developed by Python; thus, it is a cross-platform application.

Tegaki supports SCIM only. Therefore, you should install SCIM on your Ubuntu 10.04 which is iBus by default.

Step 1 - Install SCIM :

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install scim scim-modules-table scim-chewing scim-pinyin scim-chinese

im-switch -s scim
update-alternatives --config xinput-zh_TW

Select SCIM according and makes it as default.

Step 2 - Install Tegaki :

sudo apt-get install python-tegakitools scim-tegaki python-tegaki-gtk tegaki-train tegaki-recognize python-tegaki tegaki-zinnia-simplified-chinese zinnia-utils

cd ~
wget http://www.tegaki.org/releases/0.3/models/tegaki-zinnia-traditional-chinese-0.3.zip
unzip tegaki-zinnia-traditional-chinese-0.3
cd tegaki-zinnia-traditional-chinese-0.3
make
sudo make install
cd ~

Step 3 - Create Gnome menu for Tegaki :

sudo nano /usr/share/applications/tegaki.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Tegaki Handwriting
Exec=tegaki-recognize
Icon=/usr/share/tegaki/icons/handwriting.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Application;System;
Comment=Tegaki Handwriting

How to use Tegaki

Step a :
Click on "Tools/Configure" icon on the right hand side panel. Set "Search after (msecs)" to 200 or larger. Then click on "Search on stroke" and "Confirm".

Step b :
Write the Chinese characters in the boxes provided. To clear the characters click "Sweep" icon. If you want to make correction to the character that you just wrote, click on the character on the top bar.

Step c :
After wrote some characters, you can click on "Green tick". Then, go to the word processor or editor. Press "Ctrl+V" or click "Paste".

That's all! See you.