On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 11:02 PM, Henri Verbeet hverbeet@gmail.com wrote:
On 25 March 2012 16:49, Qian Hong fracting@gmail.com wrote:
IMO using win32 IME on Linux is necessary for some people. In fact even most Chinese users don't know how many Chinese IMEs there exist, some of them have no alternative at all. Also, some handwriting input method editors and some speech-to-text input method editors have no alternative on Linux. Another reason to implement win32 IME bridge is, some win32 IME, such as sogou pinyin, google pinyin, are much better than there alternative on Linux ( ibus-pinyin, sunpinyin), maybe it is hard to understanded by non Chinese users...
I'm sure that's all true, but why would making Win32 input methods run through Wine be a better (or even easier) solution than improving the Linux/X11 input methods?
Yeah, good question :)
Some reasons I know: - Some win32 input method using copyrighted input method tables, for those IME, we can't develop an alternative until the copyright is expired. - For speech-to-text input method, there are many different dialects in China, some of them are already pretty well handled by some commercial software, in theoretic we can develop alternative for them, but it takes some time, maybe that will not happen in near feature, before the chicken-and-egg problem is solved :) - For sogou pinyin and other IMEs using "Statistical language model", the quality of the IME depends on not only the algorithm but also the thesaurus and corpus, currently the best open source SLM input method -- sunpinyin, has a good algorithm, but we have no any good thesaurus at all. Google and sogou use there web search engine as a source of thesaurus and corpus, new words are generated day by day, sogou and google collect them to there input method frequently. It is really hard to do the same thing for a non-profit open source project.