Re: TIM - A Table-base Input Method Module

[Yao Zhang <yaoz vidar niaaa nih gov>]

From: Daniel Yacob <locales geez org>
 
> I do like this idea, if I were to give a wish list of features I'd like
> to see in an IM description file I'd no doubt end up describing what
> Keyman uses.  Perhaps because it is what I'm most familiar with but it
> also some nice expressive syntax.
> 
> It has occured to me before that it would be nice to be able to import
> keyman .kmn files directly.  Has an XML definition for IMs ever been
> developed?  It would *really* be nice to have some kind of universal
> vendor independent, IM definition, like unicode is to charsets.
> 
> Could TIM be taken in this direction?  Towards a XIM?  I'd be happy to
> participate in defining an XML schema for it.  Anyone interested?

Internally, a TIM table is stored as a hash table.  So the table file
is just a list of (key, value) pairs.  I have just manually converted
the simple French input method described in Keyman's tutorial and it seems
quite straightforward.  If you have a table specified in a kind of XML
format, we can add a conversion utility too.  We can call this process
'compiling' as Keyman does.

I have included qfrench.tim in the release 0.8.  You can find it at
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/wenju/

Regards,

Yao Zhang