Hi,
Not to argue if it will be useful or not, as I do not know. I think this will be technically very hard. You will have to be able to get the keystrokes for a native linux applications feed them into WINE, have wine do the IME processing and then get the resulting characters and feed them back into the native linux application. This pipeline is not trivial.
Additionally, you have not explained how this will benefit WINE. I can forsee none of the above pipeline being accepted into or applicable to WINE presently, at lest in theory, i have done work that allows native XIM clients to be able to work in wines IME framework, so if a user really wants to use windows XIM in wine they should work. The setup is tricky but in all my years of working on wine IME i have never heard of a user wanting that. Almost all requests are to make the Linux/Mac Input Methods work better in WINE.
I would love to have you work on improving IME and XIM integration in WINE, but i think the main goal of the project is pretty tangential to wine.
-aric
On 3/25/12 10:48 PM, Cheer Xiao wrote:
2012/3/26 Hin-Tak Leunghtl10@users.sourceforge.net:
Cheer Xiao wrote:
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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.
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I think you are describing the situation wrongly, in quite a few ways. Implementing pinyin *itself* is trivial - there is a standard-ish pronounciation, etc, and is completely table-driven. That's how most of Linux/X11's Chinese input method, especially pinyin, works.
What you are describing is the desirability of predictive and phrasal input methods in general, where the computer can anticipate and guess your intention as you type.
We only disagree in the definition of what a "decent" IME is. By decent I meant a decent phrasal or sentence IME. Because given the large amount of homophones in Chinese a bare pinyin IME is barely usable.
For what it is worth, you are forgetting two entire "areas" of people. Taiwan/Hong Kong had always been far more computer-literate than Mainland, so your "80% won't bother to learn another" is a gross mis-statement in both quantity and quality. Due to different dialects and other reasons, Cangjie (rather than Pinyin) had been far more popular with Chinese users. But even with Cangjie (which is shape/writing-based, rather than sound-based, thus getting around the dialect problem), predictive and phrasal input methods are desirable.
I declared that I was talking about the situation in mainland China in the beginning - I should have emphasized that along the way. But by declaring Cangjie is far more popular, you are ignoring the mass majority of people in mainland China. Again, I won't be able to convince you that the majority won't bother to learn another IME, even in highly computer-literate places like CS departments in universities. Arguing about facts is plainly meaningless.
Over 10 years ago, I had some on-line discussion on emacs-devel, with Mr RMS no less, about my continued interests and compiler problems with emacs 19 (?) despite emacs 21 being around, which had mule [multi-lingual extension] newly added (or some issue of that vintage). The reason was that I could run emacs 19 inside cxterm (a chinese x terminal). Now the curious thing is that emacs actually took *all* the input methods from cxterm! So Pinyin/Cangjie themselves worked 10+ years ago identically under emacs 19 + cxterm, and emacs 21 mule.
Yes, but "just works" is not the same thing as "usable".
What emacs did not, and still does not, implement, which cxterm did even almost 20 years ago, was predictive and phrasal inputs and also fuzzy inputs. i.e. you can type "a?b", and get the list of "a[a-z]b". That was something done almost 20 years ago which is still missing in many of the modern Chinese X11 input mechanisms.
(I have a confession to make - cxterm was orphaned for many years, and I and a few others are who kept it going-ish, in recent years, for what little needs to be done).