Text Input with Windows Tablet Panel

[Evan Easton <evan eeaston com>]

On Windows tablet PC's, there's this thing called the floating TIP 
(Tablet Input Panel) that runs all the time.  When a text field gets 
focus, it shows a little button that, when pressed opens, the tablet 
input panel.  Here you can hand write text or use an on screen keyboard 
to enter text into the text field.  It's not that surprising that when 
running GTK+ apps on a tablet pc (Windows), you don't get this nice 
floating TIP integration.  Instead, one has to load the TIP off of a 
toolbar located on the start bar, which is a pain as that keyboard 
doesn't float over the app, but rather resizes apps and hogs screen 
realestate.

The reason for this is that GTK+ text fields aren't real Windows text 
field widgets and the Windows floating TIP isn't smart enough to divine 
that.  Java Swing applications suffer the same problem as do any other 
windowing toolkits that don't implement their components via "native 
peers." (I wrote a bit on this with respect to Java here: 
http://www.eeaston.com/using-my-umpc/enabling-tablet-pc-tip-for-swing-java-apps-1)

I know virtually nothing about GTK+/gnome, and my searches on this topic 
haven't really revealed much.  Has there been any consideration for how 
to get the floating TIP working in GTK+ for windows?  I've experimented 
with setting the GDK_USE_WINTAB environmet var, but I'm either doing 
something wrong, or it really is not intended to address the floating 
TIP issue.

Any ideas?
Thanks,
Evan