Hello,
A few days ago, an idea came to my mind: What about an input method for the
latin alphabet?
Ok, usually, you don’t need this, but in some cases, you want to type
characters which are not on your keyboard, e.g. I want to type some Pinyin
syllables or so, without the need to put all these diacritica on my keyboard.
My idea is the following:
You would first write a word with the basic 26 latin letters (or more, if you
have another keyboard, like me, German). Say, if you want to write down the
German president, Horst Köhler, you would write on an English keyboard:
Horst Kohler
After you typed in Kohler, the input method automatically looks through a
table and offers some possibilities. You would then use the caps lock key (I
thought of this key, because basically it is absolutely useless but has a
really nice position on the keyboard... Really easy to reach) to go through
the options, and maybe select as the second choice “Köhler”. Some other
choices could also be there.
Even nicer would something like this:
If you type in “Alpha”, the input method would see this and display “Α” (ok,
basically, this is just not really useful), if you type in “alpha”, it would
offer α.
You could also do this with e.g. when typing in “Shanghai“, and the IM would
offer “Shànghǎi”.
Even nicer for Pinyin would be something like this: Shang4hai3, and the IM
automatically detects, that it is pinyin and offers “Shànghǎi”. If you just
type Shang, it would offer Shāng, Sháng, Shǎng, Shàng.
Also, for some other characters like „“”, this would be nice.
You type ", and then you can select, if you like to have „“”. If you type -,
you could select – (en-) or — (em-dash), or − (minus).
For this, some kind of annotation possibility would be necessary (because
maybe the differences are not really that clear if the font doesn’t display
it). Does Scim offer this possibility? I know, that the Windows Japanese IME
offers some short comments at the selection of certain characters.
I think, some kind of user-generated tables would be really nice for this,
e.g. lists of famous persons and places and so on. Also, maybe a table for
Pinyin. On a website, a database could be created and maybe regularly updated
in the program. Also, the user could add own conversation tables easily.
Because I think, not everyone would be interested in Pinyin and would be a bit
confused, if he always gets too much results, maybe some kind of tag system
would be nice to have. Like tagging all Pinyin syllables with “Pinyin“, and
thus be able to deselect Pinyin in the options and not be shown every
possibility. Also, some geographical names according to Region/Country, so
that, if the user doesn’t really communicate anything about East Asia, he
will not get the results.
So basically, what do you think? I think, this would be _really_ much easier
than using all these composite keys, because you don’t have to remember any
codes then.
Also, a shared input method for all latin based languages would be best,
because I think, most of the conversion would be shared between all the
languages. Basically, in the options, you could choose which language your
keyboard is, and then the input method would behave a little bit otherwise,
depending on your language.
Gerrit
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge
Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes
Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world
http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/_______________________________________________
Scim-devel mailing list
[hidden email]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/scim-devel
