The long time BeOS programmer SHINTA has this autumn been busy with porting the Anthy input method to the BeOS platform. Anthy is an input method add-on for typing Japanese kana-kanji strings. It works in the way that you can type roman letters (romaji), and the Anthy IM generates Japanese hiragana strings. Then push space bar, and IM converts hiragana strings to kana-kanji (mixed with hiragana and kanji) strings.

There are already a few Japanese input methods available for BeOS/ZETA/Haiku. For instance BeIM was for instance bundled with BeOS 5 Personal Edition, Canna (a freeware developed by Mr. Murai), EGBRIDGE (a commercial product by ERGOSOFT), Kaede (a commercial product by PC-CRAFT). In SHINTA's opinion the EGBRIDGE solution was the the best, but EGBRIDGE for BeOS is now sadly pulled of the market.

The lack of a decent input method, motivated SHINTA to port the Anthy IM to ZETA. Originally Anthy was developed for Linux by Tabata and Yoshida. Anthy has become highly popular and is today included in many Linux distributions and MacOS X, because of it's high conversion quality. Shinta has made the port of the conversion engine in to Lib Anthy (libAnthy.so), and is now busy with developing the more visual parts of Anthy for ZETA after the ZETA coding guidelines to get a native interface. This work includes hiragana generation, kanji candidates window, palette window, and so on.

Allthough Anthy for ZETA is still in development, the following advanced features has been implemented:

1. Support kana input: You can save typing than Roman input in generating hiragana string

2. Powerful post convert: You can convert to not only kana-kanji strings, but also katakana and wide-width (zenkaku) alphabets in various patterns

3. ZETA native: There are some differences in BeOS R5 and ZETA, so former IMs can not act correctly in some situations

SHINTA could tell ICO that he was continuing development of Anthy for ZETA to support more convenient features like auto conversion, complement conversion, word registration and other similar features.

ICO is grateful for all the work SHINTA has done for the BeOS platform through the years, and are looking forward to writing more about Anthy and other projects that SHINTA might involve himself in in the future.

Update:

SHINTA has sent us a newer screenshot of Anthy in action, and asked us to publish it:

For our Japanese readers that are interested in additional information and trying Anthy for ZETA, please visit SHINTA's project site.