Re: supporting XIM

[Tomohiro KUBOTA <debian tmail plala or jp>]

Hi,

From: Jungshik Shin <jshin@mailaps.org>
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 <kubota@debian.org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/