Installing RudisKanjiTrain

Ok, for the impatient, the short story: Download both the Java 5 and Java 6 version from the Download page, unpack them to separate directories and double-click RudisKanjiTrain.jar in both. Use the version that works. If that works, great, if not, get Java JRE 6 from www.java.sun.com, install it, and try the double-click again. If it still doesn't work, I fear you have to read on :-)

Please note, that the most common error in RudisKanjiTrain has nothing to do with the program itself. In order to see the kanji and kana your operating system must be configured to display east asian characters. You can test it, if you just browse over to some japanese page like TV Tokyo. If you see kanji and kana in your browser, great. If not, you have to solve that problem before continuing with RudisKanjiTrain. The actual solution depends on your OS but googling for "East Asian Language Support" should get you on the right track.

Installation is quite simple if you know what Java-Version you have. If you don't know, it is easier to try both the Java 5 and Java 6 version. If it still doesn't work, it could be that you only have an older version of Java. Also note that Java 1.5 is the same as Java 5 and Java 1.6 is the same as Java 6. You have to thank Sun for that confusion :-).

To find out what version of java you have you can open a command prompt or shell (whatever it is called in your OS) and type "java -ver". When in doubt, just get the newest version of the JRE from Sun and install that, then you have Java 6.

Using Java 6 is also strongly encouraged, because the kanji in Java 6 are so much more beautiful than the ones in Java 5. Really, a world of a difference.

The actual installation just consists in unpacking the downloaded rar-file somewhere.

You need some archiver capable of unpacking RAR-files. You should be able to solve that quickly by using the search engine of your choice.

To start the program, you just double-click RudisKanjiTrain.jar. There are some advanced optional steps, which are explained now.

Integrating with PenPen

By default, RudisKanjiTrain only includes my own PenPen-Levels. They are included in the "Levels" subdirectory of the program directory. If you want to use my Levels in PenPen and RudisKanjiTrain and use the PenPen-Levels in RudisKanjiTrain you could of course just copy everything everywhere. But you could also move the files to the PenPen-Directory, open the file "KanjiTrain.properties" and edit the PenPenInstallDir properties for example to:
PenPenInstallDir=C:/Program Files/PenPen

Separating the properties/settings from the program dir

System-stuff, only relevant in multi-user environments, it's ok to not care about this section :-).

Only two files in the distribution are actually written to and need write permission:

KanjiTrain.xml contains all the stories and previously guess-results, so every user wants to have a seperate copy of that. Just copy the file to the location of your choice and open it. You can even rename it and have multiple versions of it. Though by default the file last used is used. The KanjiTrain.properties stores stuff like last file used and window sizes. You can configure the path to it in KanjiTrainSystem.properties. For a unix system you probably want something like
UserProps=~/.KanjiTrain.properties
Starting with an empty property-file won't work, you have to use the given KanjiTrain.properties as a template (though you can rename it).