Japanese Reconversion

Overview

Japanese reconversion provides a function to convert a Kanji character string into another Kanji character string by presuming the original reading of the Kanji character string.

Japanese ordinally input Kanji characters by entering Kana characters and converting them into a Kanji character string with Kana Kanji conversion engine. In general, the conversion engine offers some candidates of Kanji string, and then Japanese users choose desired one. However, users might accidentally choose undesirable one for some reason like cat's interruption. In that case, Japanese reconversion is useful. Japanese reconversion provides the candidates again just by pushing HENKAN key. It avoids the painful operation that they delete the undesirable Kanji string, re-entire the same Kana characters and convert them again.

The most application supports Japanese reconversion by default since they are based on the GUI libraries like MFS that supports Japanese reconversion. OpenOffice.org has its own GUI library called VCL to provide platform independent GUI toolkit for developers working on the upper layers. However, VCL didn't support Japanese reconversion.

This article aims to provide information about whole Japanese reconversion support statuses of OpenOffice.org. This functionality can't work out only with code changes in one project. Cross-sectional code changes are required. Development for Japanese reconversion proceeds in several project in parallel. Therefore, the development information and current support of Japanese reconversion are gathered into this page. This might help us overlook the overall status of Japanese reconversion on OpenOffice.org

Other helpful resources

http://sw.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=dev&msgNo=2191 that describes why Japanese use reconversion and gives some hints about how developers can realize reconversion in your own GUI library or application.