2012/3/25 Henri Verbeet hverbeet@gmail.com:
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?
(I'm talking about Chinese, but the same is true for Japanese.)
Because developing a decent pinyin (it's a romanization scheme of Chinese; see my previous mail) IME is very hard. Yes, there are alternative input methods that is easier to implement, but the majority of the population won't bother to learn. Determined by the complexity of Chinese grammar, a decent pinyin IME would require a large corpse of vocabulary, driven by some statistical algorithm. There is ongoing efforts like open-phrase[1] to create an open source corpse database, but so far the commercial ones shipped with freeware Windows IMEs are still considerably better. To make things even harder for free software IME developers, contemporary Chinese is characterized by a rapidly changing vocabulary, thus phrase libraries become quickly outdated; freeware Windows IMEs typically updates their databases on a daily basis. The updates to databases are authored manually; data mining technology hasn't gone so far yet.
The large corpse and the frequent manual updates to databases would require commercial* support, and there hasn't been any companies willing to fund the development of a pinyin IME on Unix-like platforms.
I won't be able to come up with a bunch of citations to convince you - that will be all Chinese. If you can read Chinese, you most likely already understand the situation.
1. http://code.google.com/p/open-phrase/
* Or academia. But situation there is even worse - Chinese academies are almost stuck with Windows.