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Extended installation guide

1. Installation

Tagaini Jisho is available on several different platforms, including Windows and Mac OS, as well as being available for several Linux distributions. The correct binaries1 can be downloaded from the downloads page at tagaini.net.

Tagaini Jisho has several dependencies, other applications and libraries that it depends on. Depending on your system, this may or may not be relevant. On Windows, for instance, you need to have Japanese fonts and IME software in order to use Tagaini, whilst the other dependencies are provided in with the windows binaries.

These dependencies are:

  • Fonts
        Fonts to display Japanese characters.
        これを読んだら日本語のフォントはもうインストールしています。
        If you can not read the above then you need to install fonts.
  • An IM
        An Input Method. It is an application that allows the
        user to type characters that do not appear on the
        keyboard. You will likely need one to input Japanese
        characters.
  • Qt
        Qt is an application toolkit that was used to write Tagaini.
  • Python
        Python is a programing language that was used to
        write part of the setup process when compiling from
        source.
Platform Dependencies
Platform

Dependency

   Windows   Mac OS   Linux Binary   Source
Japanese Fonts yes yes yes yes
An IM yes yes yes yes
Qt no no yes yes
Python no no no yes

Windows

Once you have downloaded the Windows Installer, all you have to do is run it. A dialogue box will come up and ask you to accept the licence and where you would like it installed, by default C:\Program Files\Tagaini Jisho. It will place a shortcut in a folder in the applications menu, which you can run to launch Tagaini.

Fonts: If you are running Vista it is recommended that you install the Meiryo font for best visibility.

IME: To be able to input Japanese characters under Windows XP, You have to install the IME. To do so, Insert your Windows disk into your DVD-Rom drive. Go to the control panel and find regional and language options. In the language tab, under text services and input languages there is a button labelled details. Clicking it brings up another dialogue which allows you to add different input languages. Add Japanese. The keyboard should say Microsoft IME.

If the above instructions didn’t work for you, or if you would like to read a how to on the Windows IME, one can be found here or here.

Linux Japanese Support

There are several different IM’s to chose from, and each distribution of Linux will have its own documentation on getting Japanese Language support to work.

In a nutshell, the steps will read something like:

  • Get UTF-8 support / Set the locale.
  • Install Japanese fonts.
  • Install IM X with support for Y and Z.

There are multiple ways, varying by distribution and applications, to do these things. We have provided some simple and general advice, as well as links to some distribution specific how-tos.

Locale

The locale is the first thing you will have to look at. You will have to change the locale to a UTF-8 locale (ie en_GB.UTF-*.) Some distributions provide packages with locales in them, possibly called language packs, whilst others expect you to use localegen or to set them up yourself.

If the information is not one of our how to links, then you will have to search through your distributions documentation.

Fonts

Depending on your distribution you may find Japanese fonts in different packages in your package manager. Here we have a few different Japanese fonts listed, they may not be available in your package manager under these names, though they may be available under slightly different names.

There are several IM’s for Linux. Two you are likely to hear of are uim, the universal input method, and scim, the simple common input method. Uim supports xim, the X input method, which is an older IM that makes uim good for backwards compatibility, as well as terminal input with uim-fep, whilst scim interfaces with GTK. Scim has a bridging module that allows compatibility with Qt, which you will need for Tagaini. Scim will interface with mlTerm, a multi lingual terminal emulator, and a few other terms, but not with xterm or other non GTK/qt terms.

How tos and other links:
ubuntu
Debian
Mandriva
archLinux
Gentoo

Compiling from Source

As this is an Open Source project, the source code is freely available. It can be found at the bottom of the download page in a tarball2. You can also clone the git repository at gitorius.

Tagaini Jisho only has two dependencies, [Qt]3 and python. It uses several other third party libraries, but provides custom versions of them in the source tarball. If you clone the git repository then you have to download them, which can be done with the builddb.py script. The -d switch downloads the dependencies without doing anything else. If you have downloaded a tarball, then these following steps are unnessasary.

The builddb.py script is provided to build the dictionary databases, which you have to do after compiling tagaini.

Tagaini Jisho is available in several languages, as such, the translations for the interface have to be built if you are working with a git repo.

tagaini-jisho $ lrelease src/gui/gui.pro

Once you have the extra files, you first have to run qmake to generate the Makefiles.

tagaini-jisho $ qmake

From here, you may compile the release version of Tagaini:

tagaini-jisho $ make

The debug version can be compiled by:

tagaini-jisho $ make debug

To install the program, you can run:

tagaini-jisho $ make install

Now that you have installed the program, you can compile the dictionary databases;

tagaini-jisho $ ./builddb.py

By default builddb.py generates the databases in English. Passing the -h to builddb.py will list its usage and options. If you would like to build the database in another language then the you can use the --lang LA switch, where LA is a language.

The valid values are:

  • en - English (default)
  • de - German, Deutch
  • fr - French
  • es - Spansish, Español
  • ru - Russian

Upgrading

Tagaini Jisho is a work in progress and is constantly updated. To upgrade Tagaini, there is no special upgrade procedure. Simpily installing the new version over the top of the old one should work.

User data is kept separately in your home or user directory, so it will not be overwritten. When you run it for the first time after upgrading, it may convert your old data into a new format, display a message to this effect, and ask to be restarted.

Note: This information may be subject to change due to differences between releases.

0.2.3 - 0.2.4, source: Make sure to rebuild and replace your databases. Due to a field change Tagaini 0.2.4 wont read 0.2.3 kanji databased properly.

  1. A binary file is an executable file that contains information that the machine uses to run the file. tagainijisho.exe is a binary. ↩

  2. A tar ball is a container file, or archive file, which contains multiple files. They are usually compressed with Gzip or Bzip2. ↩

  3. The gentoo Qt maintainers split Qt into 14 seperate pacakges. This is done so that one does not have to compile the entire monolithic library. Tagaini only requires x11-libs/qt-core, x11-libs/qt-gui and x11-libs/qt-sql.

    tagaini-jisho $ ./builddb.py -d ↩