[Uim] uim-helper-applet: what does the 'R' button/menu do?

[Matthew Tippett]

Although I am no expert, I think I can describe the differences. 
For those gurus online, please forgive my lack of understanding of 
the terms.

In Japanese Input mode, the left button is...

	- Hiragana
	- Katakana
	- Half width katakana
	- Non-Japanese (english)
	- Romaji

The Romaji mode is double width (like the first two).  Half-width 
katakana fits in the same space as an individual character.  My 
investigations indicate that it is much more than just 'double 
space' english.  If I do 'ｖｉ' in this mode, it cannot find vi.  My 
assumption is that the ROMAJI characters are not in the standard 
ASCII character set, and so are interpreted differently.

Note that the switch key (Shift-space) switches between the first 
three and the bottom two.

As to the right button, I couldn't discern an effect - the bottom 
characters are かな (kana) and the top one is ローマ字 (romaji).  I 
don't know the effect.  Judging by the effect of the button,  I 
would say it changes the 'romaji' interpretation (し = si, not shi).

PS as a native english owner speaker, moving into Japanese is a 
baffling experience.  But I can now spot quite a few characters, 
although I still can't discern much from what I see.

Regards,

Matthew

gabor wrote:
> hi,
> 
> i am trying to use uim,
> and have been playing with the configurations and so on.
> one mayor problem for me is that the most of the docs on the webpages is
> in japanese, so for someone who wants to learn japanese it's a chicken-
> egg problem ;)))
> so here's the question:
> 
> when i add the helper applet to the panel in gnome,
> there are 2 buttons on the panel:
> -i mostly understand the first one. it switches between hiragana
> katakana and so on,
> but what does the last option do? if i turn it on, i start to write
> latin characters with big spaces between them
> 
> -the second button. it displays a 'R'.if i click on it, it display ローマ字
> and  かな. if i click on the first one, nothing happens. if iclick on the
> second one,  the following happens:
> 	-without clicking on it, when i write for example わたし i enter 'watashi'
> on the keyboard. 
> 	-but if i click on the second option, entering 'watashi' shows わたsし. i
> have to enter 'watasi' to get what i wanted. and after this, i cannot
> change back to the 'old' behaviour. clicking on ローマ字 does not help. i
> have to restart the app to make it work again.  
> 
> so what is the function of:
> -the last entry from the first button
> -the second buttons entries
> ?
> 
> thanks,
> gabor farkas
> 
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