2012/3/26 Hin-Tak Leung<ht...@users.sourceforge.net>:
Cheer Xiao wrote:
<snipped>
I'm sure that's all true, but why would making Win32 input methods run
through Wine be a better (or even easier) solution than improving the
Linux/X11 input methods?
(I'm talking about Chinese, but the same is true for Japanese.)
Because developing a decent pinyin (it's a romanization scheme of
Chinese; see my previous mail) IME is very hard. Yes, there are
alternative input methods that is easier to implement, but the
majority of the population won't bother to learn. Determined by the
complexity of Chinese grammar, a decent pinyin IME would require a
large corpse of vocabulary, driven by some statistical algorithm.
<snipped>
I think you are describing the situation wrongly, in quite a few ways.
Implementing pinyin *itself* is trivial - there is a standard-ish
pronounciation, etc, and is completely table-driven. That's how most of
Linux/X11's Chinese input method, especially pinyin, works.
What you are describing is the desirability of predictive and phrasal input
methods in general, where the computer can anticipate and guess your
intention as you type.
We only disagree in the definition of what a "decent" IME is. By
decent I meant a decent phrasal or sentence IME. Because given the
large amount of homophones in Chinese a bare pinyin IME is barely
usable.
For what it is worth, you are forgetting two entire "areas" of people.
Taiwan/Hong Kong had always been far more computer-literate than Mainland,
so your "80% won't bother to learn another" is a gross mis-statement in both
quantity and quality. Due to different dialects and other reasons, Cangjie
(rather than Pinyin) had been far more popular with Chinese users. But even
with Cangjie (which is shape/writing-based, rather than sound-based, thus
getting around the dialect problem), predictive and phrasal input methods
are desirable.
I declared that I was talking about the situation in mainland China in
the beginning - I should have emphasized that along the way. But by
declaring Cangjie is far more popular, you are ignoring the mass
majority of people in mainland China. Again, I won't be able to
convince you that the majority won't bother to learn another IME, even
in highly computer-literate places like CS departments in
universities. Arguing about facts is plainly meaningless.
Over 10 years ago, I had some on-line discussion on emacs-devel, with Mr RMS
no less, about my continued interests and compiler problems with emacs 19
(?) despite emacs 21 being around, which had mule [multi-lingual extension]
newly added (or some issue of that vintage). The reason was that I could run
emacs 19 inside cxterm (a chinese x terminal). Now the curious thing is that
emacs actually took *all* the input methods from cxterm! So Pinyin/Cangjie
themselves worked 10+ years ago identically under emacs 19 + cxterm, and
emacs 21 mule.
Yes, but "just works" is not the same thing as "usable".
What emacs did not, and still does not, implement, which cxterm did even
almost 20 years ago, was predictive and phrasal inputs and also fuzzy
inputs. i.e. you can type "a?b", and get the list of "a[a-z]b". That was
something done almost 20 years ago which is still missing in many of the
modern Chinese X11 input mechanisms.
(I have a confession to make - cxterm was orphaned for many years, and I and
a few others are who kept it going-ish, in recent years, for what little
needs to be done).
