Re: supporting XIM

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

[I Cc: to gnome-i18n as it concerns mainly the gtk2 input]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2003 at 04:17:58AM -0500, Jungshik Shin wrote:

>   As mentioned before, this is possible in GTK2 applications.
> Fire up gnome-terminal and right-click in any text input area
> and you'll get a pop-up menu from which you can choose a gtk2
> input module a la Windows.

But you are limited to only one "X input method"...
That is the big problem; it would be much better if it would be possible
to have *seceral* X input methods, like in yudit.

I never use the built-in input of gtk2, as it is too deficient for
me (I can only type some accented letters, while with an UTF-8 locale
and xkb keyboard (trough "X input method") I can type much more.
In particular esperanto accented letters, azeri schwa, and others.
But then, I cannot type in japanese...

In yudit I configured it to have one xkb method using an utf-8 locale
(and switching keyboard layouts trough the standard XFree86 keyboard
switching method it allows to type in any language using latin,cyrillic,
greek,arabic,hebrew,thai,khmer,lao,devanagari,... scripts; including
accents), and XIM methods for Japanese, Korean, Chinese simplified and
Chinese traditional.

Well, I don't always use all of them, as I don't speak all those languages;
but a lot of people may have needs that cover several input methods,
for example Korean and Japanese, or Japanese and French (something
almost impossible to do properly right now, if you have Japanese input
you lost some accents), or Chinese and accented pinyin...  

gtk2 input methods for translitering cyrillic or other scripts are
useful, but not required.
more useful are the methods to type in transliteration for scripts
that use sillabaries with a wide range of combination (korean, geez,
inuit-cree, etc.),
But there is still missing the ability to use various XIM input methods
and switch between them.
(also, the menu to choose the input method is being quite crowded now,
it should be rearanged, making some groupings of the input methods;
or even better, like the charset choice menu in gnome-terminal, have
the list of directly avaialble methods be user-configurable)

> Many more gtk2 input modules have
> to be written, but at least the framework is there.

Yes, but to make it perfect, imho, it should include the idea used
in yudit of being able to use various X input methods (meaning locale
change on the fly if needed).
If that functionality would be added it would be near perfection.

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466
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