Re: How to get started

[Jan <jandersen striva com>]

Owen Taylor wrote:
> Jan <jandersen striva com> writes:
[...]
> > My project is as follows: I am studying Chinese and I want to make a
> > simple tool that I can use for making linguistic notes - something like
> > a 'dictionary', more or less. It would allow me to enter Chinese
> > phrases, their pronunciation in eg. pinyin and/or bopomofo and comments
> > in English or any language I might choose at the time (perhaps even a
> > mix?), and it should have search facilities - especially a radical index.
[...]
> There is really not much about the tool you describe that is 
> "international". Basically, with GTK+ 2 and Unicode, text is just 
> text. 
Logically, that is true, of course - however, in practise it isn't 
quite, firstly because there isn't any font that covers the entire range 
of Unicode, as far as I know, and secondly because I want to be able to 
display Chinese characters in at least simplified as well as full form, 
plus I want to add a facility to enter 'variant forms' (like eg. seal 
characters).

> The only real question is that of input method. System integration
> of mixed input methods is not very good on Linux currently.
> But for the type of text you describe above, it doesn't actually
> sound like you need a mixed input method; a Chinese input method
> like xcin should good enough.
>
> But in any case, that's more of a user configuration issue than
> a programmer issue.
Is this really just a matter of standard GTK+ coding? I want to avoid 
producing something that can't later be used to enter, say, Arabic or 
whatever, just because I made a bad design decision in the beginning. I 
don't object to using xcin, but I want to be able to use any other input 
method at a later state without reprogramming - all things like fonts, 
input methods, lannguage etc should be fully configurable, which I think 
should be simple enough to do.

Thanks for your help!

/jan