4 This is Dasher 4.3.5, the next installment of the development series
5 leading up to 4.4. For a stable version of Dasher, please download a
6 release from the 4.2 series.
8 Dasher is a zooming predictive text entry system, designed for situations
9 where keyboard input is impractical (for instance, accessibility or PDAs). It
10 is usable with highly limited amounts of physical input while still allowing
11 high rates of text entry.
13 Dasher is Free software released under the GPL. Further documentation
14 may be found in the Doc/ subdirectory
18 Dasher makes use of the following third party software (note that this
19 list is potentially inaccurate or incomplete - please send any
20 corrections to 'dasher@mrao.cam.ac.uk'):
23 * The Expat XML parser (required)
26 * Autotools (required, build only)
27 * Intltool (required, build only)
28 * Libtool (required, build only)
29 * GTK+ (2.2 or greated) (required)
30 * GNOME (optional, but highly recommended)
31 * GNOME Speech (optional)
32 * Libcanna (optional, for Hiragana to Kanji conversion)
35 * MS Speech API (optional)
36 * MS Table API (optional - required for tablet start/stop mode)
39 * (not sure - if anyone knows then please fill this in)
41 Platform Specific Notes
42 -----------------------
43 * Solaris: Dasher has been tested on Solaris 10. You will need to
44 upgrade to gnome-doc-utils 0.3.2 to install the documentation, which
45 in turn will require libxml 2.6.12 and libxslt 1.1.8. These packages
46 are not required to run dasher once it is built.
48 There have been some issues with the gthread-2.0 pkgconfig file
49 including compiler flags which are not understood by the compiler. You
50 may need to shadow this file in another directory with these flags
53 Currently GNU make (gmake) must be used.
55 * Darwin / OS-X: The native UI in the macos directory is badly out of
56 date and will almost definitely require considerable effort to
57 build. We do not currently have the resources to maintain this port,
58 but if you are interested in contributing then let us know
59 (dasher@mrao.cam.ac.uk). The GTK2 front end should build on Darwin
60 with minimal changes, and with a recent enough version of GTK will not
61 require the X11 server.
63 Installation Instructions
64 -------------------------
65 Please see the file INSTALL.<platform> for details on how to build and
66 install Dasher from source on your host system.
70 Dasher includes some alphabets which require fonts that you probably don't
71 have installed; for example, for the International Phonetic Alphabet, Korean
72 and Hiragana (Japanese). We aren't legally allowed to distribute a font for
73 the IPA, but you can download one yourself from:
75 http://www.sil.org/computing/fonts/encore-ipa.html
80 As of Dasher 3.99.0, experimental support for Japanese Kanji entry
81 by Hiragana conversion. To build Dasher with this enabled on Linux,
82 you need the libcanna conversion library. You also need to be able to
83 access a canna conversion server, which can be on the local machine or
84 over a network. Please note that Dasher will not start a canna server
85 if none is running - you must do so manually before running Dasher.
86 Please see the Canna documentation for more details.
88 Kanji conversion in Microsoft Windows is via the IME API, which is
89 part of Windows XP and Asian builds of earlier Windows
90 versions. Support for Kanji conversion in Dasher under Windows is
91 still very much under development, so please take care when trying
92 it out. In particular, Dasher will crash if you try to enable Kanji
93 conversion on a machine which does not have Japanese localisation
96 To use Kanji conversion in Dasher, you must select 'Japanese Canna'
97 from the 'Alphabet' section of the preferences dialogue, and the
98 Japanese language model from the 'Prediction' section.
102 Please file any bug reports in the GNOME Bugzilla system:
104 http://bugzilla.gnome.org/
106 using the 'dasher' package name. We also appreciate general feedback -
107 please send any comments to 'dasher@mrao.cam.ac.uk'.
109 You can find the Dasher website at:
111 http://www.dasher.org.uk/
113 Thank you for trying Dasher,