Ulrich Ruess <utde@ms13.hinet.net> さんは書きました:
On Wednesday, December 10, 2003 23:51, Mike FABIAN wrote:
Ulrich Ruess <utde@ms13.hinet.net> さんは書きました:
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)?
For a few characters only, yes.
I use my own AltGr mappings for the German special characters äüöÄÜÖß because
Could you please tell me how to make such a mapping for a US keyboard? I would definitely prefer that to layout switching.
Create a file ~/.Xmodmap with the following contents (or append to your ~/.Xmodmap if you already have one): keysym a = a NoSymbol adiaeresis NoSymbol keysym o = o NoSymbol odiaeresis NoSymbol keysym u = u NoSymbol udiaeresis NoSymbol keysym s = s NoSymbol ssharp NoSymbol keysym e = e NoSymbol EuroSign NoSymbol keysym c = c NoSymbol currency NoSymbol keysym g = g NoSymbol sterling NoSymbol keysym i = i NoSymbol idiaeresis NoSymbol ~/.Xmodmap is automatically read when restarting your X session.
But I think such individual mappings make only sense for a few very frequently used characters. It would be very nice to have all the other special characters easily available as well. The "Compose" mechanism isn't that bad. I was thinking about adding an input method to SCIM which gives access to the complete Compose table (which contains much more than just the few characters needed for pinyin).
If you look at it in the context of general typesetting it is certainly a good idea. In the context of Chinese input I cannot see an advantage.
Not only Chinese. There is no reason why SCIM could not talk to the Canna server for example to input Japanese. It is much nicer to have *one* input server which can be switched at random between many input methods than a different input server for each method. I think for that reason the GTK2 input modules are so popular, you can switch easily between many input methods. But the GTK2 input modules can only be used in GTK2 applications. I heard that a similar feature is planned for Qt but this will be limited to Qt applications then. An XIM input server which can switch between many methods could be used to give similar functionality to all (XIM enabled) X11 applications. SCIM appears to be useful for that purpose, it appears to be easily extendable. Currently it mostly supports Chinese, but support for other languages could be added. Another interesting project is http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/uim Currently it supports mostly Japanese input methods, it can apparently be extended for other languages as well. IIIMF is supposed to be a general solution to the problem of switching between many input methods, not only for specific toolkits like GTK2 or Qt and not only for X11.
If you have time, you could consider to add an input method to XIM, which uses only the eight basic strokes.
I have not yet heard about the eight basic strokes and have no idea how that works.
Such method was available for MS software from an Australian company, but was not successfull (I guess because they had too many mistakes in the mapping table). If you could help me to understand how to do it, I would be willing to do it myself and later on give it back to the community.
-- Mike FABIAN <mfabian@suse.de> http://www.suse.de/~mfabian 睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。