Japanese keyboard without locale switching?

[Patricius]

As in title, I wonder if there is any way to use Japanese keyboard without switching to Japanese locale. In case of falling into the XY problem fallacy, I'll elaborate the root issue here:

I have some Japanese and Chinese books alongside of English ones, which would be great if I can search the title in kana and kanji. For Chinese books, I could somehow managed to search by Japanese IME using its ability to type a small subset of Chinese kanji.

However, setting the locale into Japanese grayed out my line spacing sliders in my Chinese books, and switching forth and back seems to be the only 'official' solution. So I'm looking some good solution here. Don't be restricted by the title if there is a better way to solve it. Thanks!

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Patricius

However, setting the locale into Japanese grayed out my line spacing sliders in my Chinese books,

What does that mean? Is they something peculiar to Chinese books or are you just talking about horizontal rules?

For you keyboard, the only thing I can think of is to patch nickel to use the symbol keyboard for the extra language. People have done this to add a new language. It might work for this.

[Patricius]

Maybe unlocking the grayed out slide bars is easier than tinkling with locale and keyboard.

Base on this blog ( http://soranoji.air-nifty.com/blog/2...w3131-aab.html ), I tried setting the languages from japanese to middoe english and chinese to old english... well, the slide bars now work for both japanese and chinese, which makes me feel confused.

What on the earth could be the reason for them to disable the sliders for books in japanese and chinese? At least now I've got dozens of funny 'middle and old english books' in my collections.

[Patricius]

Originally Posted by davidfor

What does that mean? Is they something peculiar to Chinese books or are you just talking about horizontal rules?

For you keyboard, the only thing I can think of is to patch nickel to use the symbol keyboard for the extra language. People have done this to add a new language. It might work for this.

I'm talking about the line space slider in the font setting section. They've disabled the line spacing and margin settings for japanese books, or both japanese and chinese books if you're using japanese UI.

The patching will not solve the problem because it needs background services to 'translate' the roman spelling to kana（仮名) or kanji (漢字), which is essential for searching by book title.

[tshering]

Originally Posted by Patricius

The patching will not solve the problem because it needs background services to 'translate' the roman spelling to kana(仮名) or kanji (漢字), which is essential for searching by book title.

You are right, this specific keyboard patch will not solve it. But maybe GeoffR could figure out how to enable the switch option between Japanese and non-Japanese keyboard.

By the way, according to my experience the setting of the UI language does not influence the behavior of the line spacing slider, the margin setting slider, how the book progress is shown, and so on. These things seem to depend solely on the language setting of the book.