Hello,

I have been playing around a bit with ewl and etk, and have run into a few
internationalization problems.

First, there seems to be no support for input methods in ecore, which
handles the keyboard input. Input methods are typically used to write more
complex languages like japanese and chinese, where the user enters some text
which is then converted by the input method to the final text sent to the
application.

This seems to be a bit of a mess in X. There is the XIM (X Input Method)
extension, but this seems to be a bit lacking and thus iiimf (not very
widespread), uim and scim have sprung up. What is best to support I don't
know. Is anyone working on adding such support to e, or are there at least
some plans to do so? I can't find anything in the TODO about this. Which way
would be the best to add it? (Though I'm sorry to say I most likely won't be
able to do it myself.)

(By the way, such input method support might also be needed to use e on an
embedded device such as a pda or a phone, to handle on-screen keyboards and
such.)

Another issue I ran into was with the font handling in evas. I can't quite
figure out how this actually works. But as far as I can tell, when given a
font in a theme there is no fallback and if a character is not in the font a
box is displayed instead. However, if given a fontconfig name for the font,
there is fallback for characters not in the font, and all characters are
displayed correctly (if a font exists on the system).

Is there a reason why there is no automatic fallback for characters not
available in theme fonts? Performance? The user would most likely be happy
if the characters are displayed, if he has a usable font on his system. =)
As an application developer, I don't know what theme the user uses, and I
don't want to hard code font names in the app... so supporting unusual
character sets would likely get ugly.

By the way, what I have been playing around with is writing a dictionary
application, which is why I ran into all these problems. To be able to
support dictionaries in any language, font handling and input methods are
troublesome.

Thanks for a great project!

/Olof Sjöbergh
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