Hi, From: Jungshik Shin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: supporting XIM Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 18:38:51 -0500 (EST)
> That's not a problem at all because there are Korean, Japanese > and Chinese input modules that can coexist with other input > modules and be switched to and from each other. With them, you > don't need to use XIM. ... One point: Many Japanese texts include Alphabets, so Japanese people want to input not only Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji, and Numerics but also Alphabets. I imagine Korean people want, too. In such a case, switching between Alphabet (no conversion mode) and conversion mode has to be achieved by simple key typing like Shift + Space. The switch must be between conversion mode and no-conversion mode, must not be among all installed input methods. Is it possible in GTK applications? (This is achieved in Windows. Alt-Esc will switch between conversion and non-conversion, while Alt-Shift will switch among installed input methods.) Another point: I want to purge all non-internationalized softwares. Today, internationalization (such as Japanese character support) is regarded as a special "feature". However, I think that non-supporting of internationalization should be regarded as a bug which is as severe as "racist software". However, GTK is a relatively heavy toolkit and developers who want to write a lightweight software won't use it. I never think "If there is one internationalized software (for example, gnome-terminal), it is enough." If developers want to develop another softwares in the same category (xterm, rxvt, eterm, aterm, ...), it means users have freedom to choose. Such a freedom of choice must not be a priviledge of English-speaking (or European-languages-speaking) people. Do you have any idea to solve this problem? > There is at least one Japanese gtk2 input module as I wrote above. > You just have to install it because it doesn't come default with > gnome 2.x. Japanese people need multiple input modules. This is because Japanese conversion is too complex for a software to perfectly achieve it. Since complexity itself sometimes confuses users, there are input methods which want to be "simple" so as not to surprise users. (However, such "simplicity" is achieved by requiring users more information or keyboard input for conversion.) People who don't want to keep watching screen nor keyboard during input sentence (expert users) tend to prefer such "simple" methods with less need to watch screen to confirm conversion result. "SKK" is one of such methods. It cannot convert multiple words at a time (unlike most of modern input methods) but it means that it never convert one word into (wrongly) multiple words. "T-Code" is much more spartan input method with one-to-one mapping from a keyboard sequence to a kanji. Though a user has to remember thousands of such mappings because Japanese language needs thousands of kanjis, such input methods are popular in a certain amount of (not many) Japanese people. Of course several Japanese companies are competing in Input Method area on Windows. These companies are researching for better input methods -- larger and better-tuned dictionaries with newly coined words and phrases, better grammartical and semantic analyzers, and so on so on. I imagine this area is one of areas where Open Source people cannot compete with commercial softwares by full-time developer teams. How about Korean? --- Tomohiro KUBOTA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/ -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/