Hi,

I have just recently loaded Fedora 18 onto my computer, after several years of using Fedora 4.

I used the version of Kiten that was in Fedora 4 quite a lot, while trying to learn Japanese, and found  it
quite useful, so I was looking forward to using the new Kiten.

However, the documentation doesn't answer some of the questions I have about how to get results from it.

In the old version of Kiten, it was possible to toggle the text entry mode between English words
and Kana by hitting Shift-Space (and you could find this in the documentation, too!).
Then, when in the Kana mode, the user could type in the syllables of the search word phonetically,
basically in romaji, and as each Japanese syllable was completed, the roman letters would be replaced
by the Kana.  Normally the replacement would be hiragana, but if the romaji phonetic spelling was in capital letters,
the replacement would be in katakana.  It was easy to learn how to use this, and this feature was super-useful,
because otherwise there would be no practical way to enter a Japanese search string at all!

Also, I never entered kanji to search on directly, because with my totally US-English keyboard there was no way,
except maybe to look all through the entire font with the previewer application.
However, it was easy to find the entries for kanji, either by clicking directly on the kanji after it showed up
in the search results, or by using the radical search window.

Now, however, with the new Kiten, Shift-Space no longer gets me into the phonetic-romaji-getting-replaced-by-kana
mode, it just puts a space into the search line and leaves me typing in English.
Also, nowhere in the documentation is there any explanation how to change the search entry mode.
The documentation says "You can enter Kanji, Kana and English and get back results from Kiten,"
but doesn't explain how to make this happen.

(1) How do we input Kana into the search window?  And (2) Please put some information about this into the Kiten Handbook.

Also, in the section on Verb Deinflection, the documentation explains what the "Deinflect" option can do,
and how it can be useful, but doesn't ever say how to turn this option on or off.  I looked through all the
Search menus, looked at all the configurable items under the Settings menu, and couldn't find anything
about this.

In the old Kiten in Fedora 4, there was some discussion in the Handbook about putting a dot
in the search string, but I didn't quite understand how to make that work.  Also, the example image
in the new documentation doesn't show any dot in the search string, so apparently that's not how
to control the deinflection capability.

So, (3) How does the user turn the "Deinflect" option on and off?  And (4) Could you please put something
explaining this into the documentation?

(Actually, until I can figure out how to enter Japanese search strings at all, those last questions are purely academic,
because I can't deinflect what I can't even type in.)

Can you please advise me (and all the future readers of your documentation too) on how to get to the Kana entry mode,
and how to control the deinflection capability?

Except for these issues, I've really liked using the old Kiten, and have high hopes to get a lot out of the new one.

Thanks,

Regards,
Fred Hawes