Re: Japanese input (was RE: tlug: Japanese)

[Gaspar Sinai <gsinai@example.com>]

Hi Matthew,
Nice to meet you on tlug's list :)

On Sun, 7 Jun 1998, Matthew J. Francis wrote:

> 

[...]

> [input unification]
> 
> 
> What you're suggesting could also be done to a great extent, I think,
> even without the complete alliance of all the parties.
> What it would take is:
> 
>  - One library and/or daemon that knows how to speak to *all* the
>    available back-end servers;
> 
>  - A set of widgets that know how to use the services from the
>    first
> 
>  - A compelling reason for people to start using the second.
> 
> I think that exactly that compelling reason is the olive-branch of
> Unicode support, that Yudit extends into the sea of a thousand one-locale
> charsets. Hardly anything supports Unicode at the moment, and there's no
> real reason they can't use Yudit's support; the core widgets have already
> been ported to two major toolkits (Qt and Motif), so I don't think adding
> the other major ones (e.g. GTK+) would be a major problem.
> 
> If we can package them separately, and say, "Here, look, just compile in
> this here widget instead of (toolkit X)'s default entry/text edit control,
> and you can have free Unicode support", I really think people will use
> them. Quite probably even the toolkit writers would be interested in such
> a thing. (If done right, other, non-Unicode text forms could also be
> catered for - a drop-in replacement/upgrade for Kinput2?)
> 

I don't think that it would be difficult to port Yudit to GTK. What
would be really good is to MERGE Yudit with GTK. If you look at Yudit 1.0,
you can compile it  with Xlib only and Yudit itself provides a widget
set that uses UTF8 encoded text for labels, menus e.t.c. If GTK had it
it would be beneficial for all of us.

To return to the subject of this thread, I always felt a little confused
about the over-complicated X11 input methods, and that is why Yudit
mostly uses external roman-transliteration maps. I dont think it would be 
difficult to start a project to make use of those Linux guys all around
the world and build  uniocde input methods for all languages cleaning up
all the mess created by this localization thing. The first step could be
to put Yudit's unicode conversion utilities into a library.

Of course to get all this nicely integrated into GTK would mean that
we need to attrect  the attention of GTK developers. 

Perhaps we should put this into KDE first, that usually speeds them up :)


Cheers,
gaspar

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