Re: Pango Multilingual Input Reading

[Noah Levitt <nlevitt columbia edu>]

On Fri, Jan 09, 2004 at 11:09:27 -0800, Stefan Baums wrote:
> > Pango doesn't do anything with input. If you are using gtk+,
> > internationalized input is pretty much taken care of.
> 
> Far from it.  Right clicking on a GTK+ 2.2.4 text field gives me a
> choice of
> 
>    Amharic (EZ +)
>    Cedilla
>    Cyrillic (Transliterated)
>    Hangul (KSC 5601)
>    Inukitut (Transliterated) [typo for Inuktitut?]
>    IPA
>    Thai (Broken) [sic!]
>    Tigrinya-Eritrean (EZ +)
>    Tigrinya-Ethiopen (EZ +)
>    Vietnamese (VIQR)
>    X Input Method
> 
> That doesn’t exactly cover the world’s writing systems.  

Sure it does. Gtk+ isn’t the right place for input methods
for every writing system. Xkb and XIM should be able to
handle everything in X, and win32 has its own input system.

> Notably
> missing are the Indian scripts (that I assume the original poster
> was particularly interested in and for which he would have to
> download an input method separately somewhere – check out the
> Indix Project); 

As far as I know, Xkb is sufficient for indic scripts.

> and the Chinese writing system (for which one
> would have to go through an external input method engine, and I
> have not yet found a single one that works satisfactorily _and_
> does so in a UTF-8 locale).  

Ok, but that’s not a gtk+ problem.

> 
> Relatedly, where how can I set the GTK+ default input method
> permanently to XIM?

You can set the environment variable GTK_IM_MODULE=xim.
There might be other ways, not sure. 

Noah