GSoC proposal

[Hin-Tak Leung]

Cheer Xiao wrote:
<snipped>
>> 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.
<snipped>

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.

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.

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.

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).