Input-method for on-screen-keyboard to Japanese

1st Official Post

    I want to change the input-method of the on-screen-keyboard to Japanese. In practice this means I want to write Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji.

    I don't want to change only the layout (but maybe Kodi means the same at this point?) and not the display language.

    The LibreElec settings offere jp106 as keyboard layout. But this has no effect on the system. I assume this affects only a real (via usb) connected keyboard.

    Kodi itself offers also a keyboard layout setting - but nothing about input method. In this layout settings are e.g. Korean and Russian offered. So Japanese shouldn't be a problem also. But Japanese is not offered. I can I bring Japanese into the system here?

    Or do I have to use a different way?

    Edited once, last by MoonKid (October 8, 2018 at 9:16 PM).

    I wasn't aware that this is relevant for a on-board-keyboard. It is a Pi2 with a One-4-All remote controlle connected via FLIRC as the only one hardware input methode.

    • Official Post

    If you want the OS to display Japanese text in the Console you need to install "locale" from our addon repo. If you want to change the keyboard layout; this is done in the LE settings addon and the options available are dictated by the graphics stack (as I said in the other thread). Xorg has an extensive list of layout options but the Raspberry Pi has more limited options because we are running directly on the framebuffer, we are not using Xorg like Raspbian. Finally you have the on-screen GUI keyboard and Skin language options in Kodi settings.

    I think we still missunderstood.

    My Kodi still display japanese and other non-roman characters without problems. This is not about display.

    It is about input for the on-board-keyboard. And the "Console" doesn't matter here. I don't use the console - only sometimes via SSH.

    General question: Does Kodi differentiate between "input methode" and "Keyboard layout"? Or is this the same in "Kodi language"? In other "modern" operating systems (Linux, Windows, Mac) this are different things.

    As I described in my starting post: The Kodi settings about keyboard layout doesn't offer japanese. So how can I modify Kodi to offer me japanese here. There is also no "input methode" setting anywhere - because of that I assume that "input methode" and "keyboard layout" is the same in Kodi and not differentated by it.

    • Official Post
    Quote from MoonKid

    It is about input for the on-board-keyboard.

    I think that's the reason for the misunderstanding. You mean the keyboard on your remote control. I use CEC to make my TV remote control work with the Raspberry Pi. That may work for you, too.

    If CEC has been activated on TV (read your TV handbook to find the option, it has different names sometimes, like Viera-Link for Panasonic TV's), it will pass-through the commands from remote control to HDMI cable, and so to your Raspberry Pi. No need to use FLIRC.

    • Official Post

    OK, I understand the question now.

    Quote from MoonKid

    Kodi itself offers also a keyboard layout setting - but nothing about input method. In this layout settings are e.g. Korean and Russian offered. So Japanese shouldn't be a problem also. But Japanese is not offered. I can I bring Japanese into the system here?

    Or do I have to use a different way?

    You are right. On "Settings -> Interface -> Regional -> Keyboard layouts" there is no entry to select a Japanese on-screen keyboard. It has not been implemented yet.

    PS: To my knowledge, the on-screen keyboard is not compatible to other systems. You maybe want to work together with the LE developers to do the implementation.

    The Kodi team does not use github for feature requests at the moment (actually we switched to github for issues about 5 minutes ago...), so your submission was closed immediately.

    That being said: for someone with a bit of coding and a bit of knowledge of how Japanese works:

    What needs to be done is most likely something similar to what was submitted in this PR for Korean: (see Add Korean keyboard by sportica · Pull Request #7952 · xbmc/xbmc · GitHub )

    ór similar to what was done for Chinese, where the input is using a cloud service to transform ascii input to the correct characters. (see [keyboard] support coding input method for chinese by taxigps · Pull Request #5326 · xbmc/xbmc · GitHub )

    I don't see an advantage of coding such a lot for such a simple problem.

    Kodi runs on nearly any OS. Any OS offers services for this. E.g. on Linux you can use IBUS with Anthy to type Japanese or other "exotic" things.

    The question is: Can't Kodi be modified that way that it is able to use extern services a generic way?

    • Official Post

    No, because Kodi aims to run on multiple distributions and Linux has no standard method so it's up to individual distributions how support is packaged. Once you look at the complexity of handling things over multiple OS platforms (and distros) the idea of using a cloud service that works the same way everywhere, it's actually more simple.