Re: Thoughts and questions about input

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Shahbaz A Chaudhary <chaudhar@engin.umich.edu> writes:

> First of all I am not familiar with teh technical details of this project
> but am interested as a user and a developer who will eventually make use
> of this functionality.  Having said that...

Well, I'm not working on Pango just so I can use it myself. (As much
I'd like to be fluent in 10-15 languages, it just isn't going to
happen...) I'm very interested in finding out how end-users and
end-developers want things to work.

> I am currently using widnows 2000 which come with an english default.  I
> included Urdu as well and now when I need to switch between teh two I use
> a key combination of "alt+left_shift."
> 
> I think it is important to be able to switch between the modes since,
> especially in casual urdu writings, a large percentage of urdu text is
> bound to contain english words.  If a user needs to use a mouse (which
> means take their hand off the keyboard and disrupt their train of thought
> (and train of typing) ) then it will be an obvious hassle.

It is clearly important to support toggling between a Roman and
a non-Roman keyboard via a hotkey. I'd also like to support somebody
who wants to write Urdu with intermingled Russian words, though
perhaps that need not be as convenient, since it is a less common
case...
 
> Now switching between multilingual typing modes is different from
> switching between overall gui translation.  By that I mean an Urdu user
> may be using english version of X-windows, but just need the ability to
> type a few lines in Urdu--which is when we need quick and simple mode
> switching.  If the user wants his/her whole gnome environment to switch
> from displaying menus etc. in english to urdu, then I don't see a great
> need for quick changes (but then again I don't think Pango needs to worry
> about this anyway).

I don't see doing on fly switching of translations - while it would
be "cool", it doesn't have much practical benefit, and is very
hard to do right.

(If somebody has create a label widget with:

 sprintf ("File: %s") 

how do you change that to "Fichier: %s", when the format string
is long gone? It would require major changes to the way application
writers create applications.)

But switching input language on the fly is much more important
for practical applications, and, luckily, also much more doable.

Thanks for the input,
                                        Owen