The purpose of this note is to analyze the steps for setting chinese input method Fcitx in an English system environment.
If you just Google the articles about installing the fcitx, almost most of them we noted that, you must setting the LC_CTYPE to zh_CN.UTF-8 locale as the prerequisite. Unfortunately, it is wrong, or partly wrong. Allthough fcitx cannot run on POSIX and C locale, But, it can run on the en_US.UTF-8 locale settings. And it can provide you the same english enrionment.
There are mainly three important environment variables, they are:
- XMODIFIERS it connects only to the im module. and common setting as
this XMODIFIERS="@im=fcitx"
- GTK_IM_MODULE setting the im select for gtk programs. notice that
only your fcitx compile USE flag contains gtk, gtk3, you should set it:
GTK_IM_MODULE=fcitx, otherwise for common gtk2 programs,
GTK_IM_MODULE=xim.
- QT_IM_MODULE setting the im select for qt programms. the same from
the above, you should set QT_IM_MODULE=fcitx only you USE the qt4
flag. and common situation is QT_IM_MODULE=xim.
Yes, All about this, for startx command, you should putting the above environment variables in .xinitrc. if you use Slim, you could put it in the xsessions files. Provided that You locale is not POSIX or C, it will works.
First you should copy the fonts into a system fonts directory or
user self-definition directory. And if you use the self-definition
directory, you should add the FontPaths directory in the xorg.conf
directory.
Second, you need to enter the font directory, and construct the
fonts.scale and fonts.dir files for indexing of fonts. with the
following commands.
mkfontscale
mkfontdir
Finally, we need to reconstruct the fonts cached with command
fc-cached -fv
After you reboot the X system, you could use the command fc-list | grep
-i font-name
And that's all.