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.
- I use US-keyboard layout - <AltGr><u> is only two keys but <Multi_key><"><u> is three keys - I can't use compose anyway because I usually use kinput2.
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. If you have time, you could consider to add an input method to XIM, which uses only the eight basic strokes. 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.
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.
Switching keyboard layouts is of course possible, but it drives me nuts to switch e.g. between US and German keyboard layout. Most special characters (e.g. parenthesis, ...) are on different keys and even alphabetical characters (like 'z' and 'y') change position. Switching between such different layouts isn't good for typing speed,
I fully agree
sticking to one layout and using input methods for everything not accessible via that layout is faster in my opinion.
I am using XIM and hate the switching between XIM and English even more than the switching between layouts, but I admit, this is just my opinion. Others may feel differently.