Re: Concerning Keyboard Status Menu

[Ma Xiaojun <damage3025 gmail com>]

On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 4:17 AM, Debarshi Ray <rishi is lostca se> wrote:
> So why not fix and improve the current engines?

Sure we should. But that's unrelated. What I asking for now is not to
cause regression to existing user experience.

> But then you just said that the current engines are all inferior to
> the ones found in Windows and Mac OSX.

Having more choices still make things a little better. And that's how
some users now survive in Linux world and you are going to break it.

I can document the current situation here:
ibus-pinyin is kind of feature rich (among IBus Pinyin engines) but
its language model is naive so it's conversion experience is not very
good.
ibus-sunpinyin uses more advanced language model so it have better
conversion result, but it doesn't support Traditional Chinese nor
custom phrases.
ibus-rime is actually a meta engine rather than a pure pinyin engine.
It has no setting GUI and require users to change its yaml
configurations. You can do anything with it you are determined to do
so. But the overall experience is decent so I'm using it. And it's a
cross platform engine that most users probably using Windows. But has
you can see, it is a perfect example of third-party engine. It's like
some people go Emacs even if they have Gedit.
ibus-libpinyin is a fork of ibus-pinyin with more sophisticated
language model. So it is also feature rich. But it hasn't outperform
ibus-pinyin much from a user's point view yet.

So the user can make a choice. Just like we can make choice for
programming languages, editors, ...

> I care. GNOME cares.
>
> Why are Windows and Mac OSX users more happy with respect to Chinese
> inputting? Honest question.

Two things:
1. Because configuring input method are easier in Windows and Mac OSX.
Our integration should be trying to solve this.
2. Because decent engines are available and easy to install. Even if I
use RIME (ibus-rime being its IBus version) on both Ubuntu 12.04 and
OS X 10.7. Ubuntu 12.04 requires compiling. ( I guess no Fedora
package also. ) Though it is another issue, in GNOME 3.6 environment,
ibus-rime will meet new challenges in the installation process.

> How are those 100 input methods presented to the user in Windows?
> Screenshots?

I don't have root access to any Windows machine currently. I can ask
for help if you really want it. Newly installed engines should just
stay in same name space with built-in engines (I grow up with Windows
then switched to Linux and OS X)

> Let me put it this way. Chinese may well be a fascinating language but
> it is not the only one which requires complex input methods or
> rendering.  Lets not get into this "you don't know my language"
> argument.

I'm not aware of any modern languages have thousands of common glyphs
other than Chinese and Japanese.
I do know that some languages, e.g., Hindi are harder to render. But
that's unrelated.