On Wednesday, December 10, 2003 16:20, Mike FABIAN wrote:
Ulrich Ruess <utde@ms13.hinet.net> さんは書きました:
I think it is quite easy to add a new input method to SCIM which enables you to input these characters. That would probably be the most efficient way for you to input these characters as you are using SCIM anyway. I have to update the SuSE SCIM packages anyway, I'll have a look whether I can add something like that.
Before you do this, please consider that for pinyin input you do not need these characters, since the "tone" is already mapped to some characters on the keyboard (mostly the keys 1 to 5). The result of a pinyin input on the keyboard is a Chinese character and not it's pinyin representation. If you want the pinyin (with the tone marks) appear on the screen, you use your normal alphabet input. These accented characters are only for typesetting of pinyin in the Latin alphabet.
If I understood Philip right, this is exactly what he wants to do, he wants to typeset pinyin in the Latin alphabet. But his keyboard doesn't have these characters, therefore he needs an input method. "Compose" would qualify as a suitable input method according to Philip, but unfortunately "Compose" cannot be used together with any other XIM like SCIM.
I also think that this is what he wants, but now let us look at the flow of input if this is implemented: 1. Activate XIM (or SCIM) in the mode for Chinese output (real Chinese characters) 2. Enter the pinyin representation for the desired character 3. The desired character appears on screen 4. Switch XIm (or SCIM) to the mode of pinyin output (the pinyin representation of the desired character) 5. Enter the same pinyin again 6. The pinyin representation of the character appears on screen 7. Deactivate XIM (or SCIM) 8. Enter the English text Would it not be easier and more convenient to create a special keyboard mapping which contains the necessary accented characters (e.g. by using Alt-Gr switching, or hot-keys)? The flow of input would then be: 1. Activate XIM (or SCIM) in the mode for Chinese output (real Chinese characters) 2. Enter the pinyin representation for the desired character 3. The desired character appears on screen 4. Deactivate XIM (or SCIM) 5. Enter the same pinyin again by using the special mapping 6. Enter the English text (also with this special mapping, since one does not lose any keys needed for English when the re-mapping is done properly) Switching between different keyboard layouts while using XIM is painless, I do it all the time when I have to switch between English, German and Chinese. From my personal experience it is very dangerous to put Latin characters that shall appear as such into Chinese input methods, because it makes the Chinese then code all Latin characters as Chinese. If you have ever received a technical specification written by a Taiwanese engineer who does not like using English, you know what I mean. He will invariably use a Chinese font because for his eyes the Latin characters in the Chinese fonts look much better. For letters and numbers this does not matter because (in this case) Big-5 contains all ASCII characters, but he will write "km" not as a string consisting of "k" and "m", but as (U+33CE), because then he has to write one character only. If you then do not have a Chinese enabled system (at least for reading), you have a spec. without any units.
Tone input for pinyin becomes less and less important as the quality of sentence analyzing programs increases.
-- Mike FABIAN <mfabian@suse.de> http://www.suse.de/~mfabian 睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。
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