Hey!
Does anybody know a decent input method for Traditional Chinese in Pinyin for Linux? I've been using SCIM but the Pinyin Input Method mysteriously disappeared when I upgraded to Ubuntu 13.04, and I couldn't recover it. Plus I don't like iBus. Help is greatly appreciated!

why do you not like ibus? it has quite a good pinyin engine, and it is the most used and well integrated input system on linux

Because I don't like the obscure traditional variants like 裏 instead of 裡. Or is there a way around them?

I use Fedora 18 with Gnome and as I understand the ibus-pinyin engine is integrated with it. So there is no need, at least in the OS I run to install it as an external piece. It has been very efficient for me. The characters and fonts in general are larger by default in the OS, which has made studying Chinese a bit easier.

I have to use Skritter in Chrome with a Wacom tablet to have decent performance. Tried with Firefox and Flash, but the CPU usage went way up and it was practically unusable.

The laptop I use is a salvaged HP 530 Intel Centrino with 4 GB of RAM and a 64GB SSD. It's *old*, but very usable for this endeavor of learning Chinese. All 32-bit.

Thanks usbrandon; when you are in Traditional mode, what are the outcomes when you type, say, 'limian' or 'taiwan'? I'd like to get 裡面 and 台灣, respectively.

iBus gives me 裏面. But you could teach it 裡面 in one go and then it'd show you that instead...

But still can't teach anything that has a 台 in it, right?

For the time being, I'm using IBus Pinyin. I exported my Skritter words and picked those that contain 裡 and 台 and made them custom phrases.

It's the best I can do for now, but I still don't like IBus :( For one, I can't type phrases or whole sentences with the custom words in them, and furthermore it lacks a decent Cantonese input method.

Thanks for the help guys, I'll be looking out for an IME I can be happy with!

Someone ported the Android version of Google Pinyin (not the desktop version) to Linux. I'm not sure if it would solve your problem; I've never used it. It seems to work as a scim plugin. If you decide to play with it, let me know how it turns out. https://code.google.com/p/scim-googlepinyin/

Thanks dbkluck, I already tried it out. Unfortunately, you can neither go into simplified-only mode nor to traditional-only mode, so the candidates always include SC and TC, and also the dictionary is strictly simplified, so it's a pain to write Traditional Chinese with it. Other than that, it works well, so go for it if Simplified is what you want to type!

What about the "Chewing" input mentioned on this page: http://www.pinyinjoe.com/linux/ubuntu-10-chinese-input-pinyin-chewing.htm.

It says, "The Chewing input method continues to offer traditional characters in the Taiwan standard Big 5 encoding, with Zhuyin ("chew-ing", get it?), Hanyu Pinyin, Eten, IBM and many other keyboards."

They mention "Hanyu Pinyin," maybe that would work? I'm at work now and I don't have a Linux box to play with it.

I wanted to try it out, but I have the same problem as with SmartPinyin; it's installed, but I can't enable it in SCIM :(

Huh. They have a Chewing plugin for ibus too; any luck with that?

Haven't tried that one out - is it smart?

I assume it's the same Chewing system whether it's plugged in to SCIM or ibus. I'll try to play with it this weekend.