.TH KANA8½ 1
.SH NAME
kana8½ \- language transliterator
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B kana8½
[
.I args
]
.SH DESCRIPTION
The
.I kana8½
script starts an instance of the window manager
.IR 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 button 2 in this window
chooses among English (default), Russian, Japanese hiragana or katakana, or Greek.
Language may also be controlled by sending one of
.BR english ,
.BR katakana ,
.BR hiragana ,
.BR russian ,
or
.BR greek
to the file
.BR /mnt/kanactl/data .
.PP
The Japanese selections
interpret lower-case letters as a Hepburn representation
of hiragana or katakana.
The Russian selection interprets letters as Cyrillic;
the transliteration is mostly phonetic, with
.B '
for
.IR myagkij-znak ,
.B ''
for
.I tverdyj-znak
(spell it
.I tvyordyj-znak
if you want the dieresis),
.B j
for
.IR i-kratkaya .
No transliteration is done in English mode.
.PP
If no arguments are given, the font specification
.B unicode.9
is used; if there are arguments, they are passed unchanged
to the window system and an appropriate font must already be installed.
.PP
The command is a short script that starts
.BR aux/kana ;
this program inserts itself between
.BR /dev/cons
and the window system,
and performs the transliteration.
The script
then invokes an instance of
.I 8½.
.SH FILES
.TF /mnt/kanactl/data
.TP
.B /mnt/kana/data1
used as a naming point for binding output upon
.BR /dev/cons .
.TP
.B /mnt/kanactl/data
for controlling language.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.IR 8½ (1)
.SH BUGS
Considerably more sophistication is required to support
ideographic languages.
.PP
The language can't be selected independently in each window.
