NAME

kana8½ − language transliterator

SYNOPSIS

­kana8½ [ ­args ]

DESCRIPTION

The ­kana8½ script starts an instance of the window manager 8½(1) able to transliterate keyboard letter sequences into characters in languages that do not use the Latin character set. It also creates a small control window; a menu on button 2 in this window chooses among English (default), Russian, Japanese hiragana or katakana, or Greek. Language may also be controlled by sending one of english, katakana, hiragana, russian, or greek to the file /mnt/kanactl/data. 

The Japanese selections interpret lower-case letters as a Hepburn representation of hiragana or katakana.  The Russian selection interprets letters as Cyrillic; the transliteration is mostly phonetic, with ­’ for myagkij-znak, ­” for ­tverdyj-znak (spell it ­tvyordyj-znak if you want the dieresis), ­j for i-kratkaya. No transliteration is done in English mode.

If no arguments are given, the font specification ­unicode.9 is used; if there are arguments, they are passed unchanged to the window system and an appropriate font must already be installed. 

The command is a short script that starts aux/kana; this program inserts itself between /dev/cons and the window system, and performs the transliteration.  The script then invokes an instance of ­8½. 

FILES

­/mnt/kana/data1 used as a naming point for binding output upon /dev/cons. 

­/mnt/kanactl/data
for controlling language.

SEE ALSO

8½(1)

BUGS

Considerably more sophistication is required to support ideographic languages. 

The language can’t be selected independently in each window. 

Plan 9  —  January 03, 1993