Marc Waeckerlin
BTW: There's not really need for a Russian, Arabian, Greek, Tamil, Kannada or whatsoever "alfabetical" language (in contrary to the asian "sign" languages), because you can simply switch the keyboard in KDE to any of the given layouts and then enter characters of that language.
I have not yet tried Russian, Arabian, Greek, Tamil, and Kannada, but
I think there are reasons why one might want such input methods, even
if there are keyboard layouts.
For example, SCIM also supports a M17N-t-latin-post input method
which can be used to input European languages. For example German:
a" -> ä
s/ -> ß
...
As I use US keyboard layout, I like that very much. Of course I could
switch to German keyboard layout to input German characters, but then
many characters are on different keys. Switching between different
keyboard layouts reduces my typing speed a lot.
Imagine for example that you usually use German but also type French,
and Spanish from time to time. Switching between German, French
and Spanish keyboard layouts will be very inefficient, the
differences in layout are bit and you cannot easily adapt,
especially when touch typing (not looking at the keyboard at all).
In my opinion, one can type much faster if one stays with one keyboard
layout and learn to use that really efficiently. But then one has to use
input methods for everything not available on that keyboard layout
of course.
Therefore I like input methods like M17N-t-latin-post and maybe there
are similar reasons why one might want to use input methods for other
alphabetic languages exist.
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Mike FABIAN