Re: XIM String Conversion Callback

[Mark Leisher <mleisher crl nmsu edu>]

    Steve> Is this supported in XIM? I never actually got around to fully
    Steve> implementing the pre-edit stuff, when I cleaned up and debugged
    Steve> IMdkit, but I thought the process was that once you committed the
    Steve> pre-edit string it stayed that way. I can understand how the
    Steve> reconversion you describe might well be useful when editting
    Steve> existing text. In experimenting with intelligent Chinese entry, I
    Steve> never really found a way to make this kind of thing work
    Steve> well. Context derived directly from the typists actions seems the
    Steve> only sort that really works well. Deriving context from globs of
    Steve> text in languages without formal punctuation is tough! Then again,
    Steve> maybe my methods were just not intelligent enough.

I don't know if it is available from XIM, but this feature is supported to a
certain extent in Wnn and might be in SJ3 and Canna as well.  Except for
Hanja-to-Hangul, converting back to a phonetic form (Kana/Pinyin/BoPoMoFo)
seems to be as ambiguous as converting the other way.

One early dictionary editing program (no longer used as far as I know) used to
store the original Kana as an annotation on the Kanji+Kana strings to
facilitate faster editing of dictionary entries.

Systems like Emacs, which keep annotation/attribute information parallel to
the text, can be easily adapted to include phonetic form annotations.  Memory
intensive, but less ambiguous than doing a reverse conversion.
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Mark Leisher
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