GSoC proposal

[Cheer Xiao]

2012/3/26 Hin-Tak Leung <htl10 at users.sourceforge.net>:
> 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.
>

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).



-- 
Regards,
Cheer Xiao aka. xiaq