Re: On the spot input

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

On Tue, Feb 15, 2000 at 05:06:15PM -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:

> It could be interesting to support loadable input-method modules in 
> GTK+.

Yes; and also support input particularities that don't need playing
with the spot.
I think for example to the so called "TELEX" input for vietnamese (it
consist in the use of ascii letter not used in vietnamese to represent
the accents; it allows very fast typing); there is no need at all to have
a separate window with a list of possible choices; as there is only one
choice. So all that is needed is a buffer that analyses the input flow,
and when need replace the last typed letters (7bits) by some others (8bits);
it's like sending some ^H then retyping.

Arabic too could use a similar input method to type in normal iso-8859-6
and have the gtk input module automatically do the letter shaping to
iso-8859-6_8 (iso-8859-6 extended with different shapes of the letters in
unused places; look at http://www.langbox.com/fontara8.html for an example;
several X11 *-iso8859-6 fonts are in fact iso-8859-6_8 (which makes sense;
so they provide more useful glyphs)) or to unicode.
Yes, arabic is supposed to be encoded in shape-less mode, and the renderer
doing the job of properly shape them; however that isn't allways possible,
and it may be desirable to produce a pre-shaped document (for writting an
html page for example); if an input method could be choosed that does it
transparently it would be a big plus for the user.

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

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