KANA8½(1) KANA8½(1)
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 but-
ton 2 in this window chooses among English (default), Rus-
sian, 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 translitera-
tion is mostly phonetic, with ' for myagkij-znak, '' for
tverdyj-znak (spell it tvyordyj-znak if you want the diere-
sis), 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 sys-
tem, 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.
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