IBUS bug fix ... again (sigh!)

Further to https://cikitsa.blogspot.ca/2012/01/ibus-bug-fix.html, I found the same bug cropping up in Linux Mint 18.1, with IBUS 1.15.11.

Some applications don't like IBUS + m17n, and certain input mim files. For example, LibreOffice and JabRef.  Trying to type "ācārya" will give the result is "ācāry a". And in other strings, some letters are inverted: "is" becomes "si" and so forth.

Here's the fix.

Create a file called, say ibus-setting.sh with the following one-line content:

export IBUS_ENABLE_SYNC_MODE=0

Copy the file ibus-setting.sh to the directory /etc/profile.d/, like this:

sudo cp ibus-setting.sh /etc/profile.d

Make the file executable, like this:

sudo chmod +x /etc/profile.d/ibus-setting.sh

Logout and login again.

Phew!

This fixes the behaviour of IBUS + m17n with most applications, including LibreOffice and Java applications like JabRef.  However, some applications compiled with QT5 still have problems.  So, for example, you have to use the version of TeXStudio that is compiled with QT4, not QT5. [Update September 2018: QT5 now works fine with Ibus, so one can use the QT5 version of TeXstudio with no problem.]

Converting XeLaTeX into ODT or MS Word

TeX4ht can do a lot of the work of converting from LaTeX to wordprocessor.  But when one adds in the complications of UTF8 characters, multiple scripts, and XeLaTeX, things can get complicated.

C. V. Radhakrishnan today pointed me to this discussion on the TeX4ht mailing list:

• http://tug.org/pipermail/tex4ht/2013q1/000719.html
  (or more neatly, here.)

What Radhakrishnan says is:

As far as I understand, TeX4ht won't support fontspec or XeLaTeX
technologies of using system fonts that do not have *.tfm's. In effect, by
adopting TeX4ht, one is likely to loose the features brought in by XeTeX.
However, here is another approach.

   1. We translate all the Unicode character representations in the
   document to Unicode code points in 7bit ascii which is very much palatable
   to TeX4ht. A simple perl script, utf2ent.pl in the attached archive does
   the job.
   2. We run TeX4ht on the output of step 1.
   3. Open the *html in a browser, I believe, we get what you wanted. See
   the attached screen shot as it appeared in Firefox in my Linux box.

Here is what I did with your specimen document.

   1. commented out lines that related to fontspec package from your
   sources named as alex.tex.
   2. added four lines of macro code to digest the converted TeX sources
   3. ran the command: perl utf2ent.pl alex.tex > alex-ent.tex
   4. ran the command: htlatex alex-ent "xhtml,charset=utf-8,fn-in" -utf8
   (fn-in option is to keep the footnotes in the same document). I have used a
   local bib file, mn.bib as I didn't have your bib database. biber was also
   run in the meantime to process the bibliography database.
   5. open the output, alex-ent.html in a browser. I got it as you see in
   the attached alex.png.

 Radhakrishnan's PERL script utf2ent.pl is

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

for my $file ( @ARGV ){
  open my $fh, '<:utf8 br="" cannot="" die="" file:="" file="" open="" or="">   while( <$fh> ){
      s/([\x7f-\x{ffffff}])/'\\entity{'.ord($1).'}'/ge;
        print;
  }
}

For Radhakrishnan's continuing comments on TeX4ht development, see

• http://www.cvr.cc/?p=623#comments

TeX4ht's homepage:

• http://www.tug.org/tex4ht/