iLiad Chinese IME?

[hansel]

Originally Posted by ericshliao

I just found that the translation table used by GCIN are all utf-8 format. It's easy to read. The attached "phone.zip" is the table of Zhuying IME used by GCIN. Each line is a translation of a glyph. The first part of a line is the combination of key(or keys) . The second part is the target glyph. There are two "space" between them. If you have Chinese font installed in your system, you can view the file without any problem.
When you read the file, the lines after "%keyname begin" are the buttons on keyboard and their respective basic symbols used by the IME, and the lines after "%chardef begin" are translation of each glyph.

I'm trying to evaluate if I could do Chinese input for MiniPad...

= I'm not sure if I understand the file attached to the referenced post: there ar lots of glyphs that have the same key combination?!?

1up 彬
1up 檳
1up 儐
1up 斌
1up 繽
1up 豳
1up 瀕

= How does one remember those key combinations? Is ther any form of visual feedback (wich would be ugly on the slow Iliad display)

[ericshliao]

Originally Posted by hansel

= I'm not sure if I understand the file attached to the referenced post: there ar lots of glyphs that have the same key combination?!?

1up 彬
1up 檳
1up 儐
1up 斌
1up 繽
1up 豳
1up 瀕

The table is ok. For Chinese language, it's common that multiple glyphs have the same pronunciation. Zhuying IME is based on each glyph's pronunciation. The pronunciation of the above glyphs are all the same, so they have the same input combination. When two or more glyphs have the same input combination, the screen will pop up a menu for users to pick one glyph by number keys. The attached image is a example using Zhuying IME to input "1up".
I don't know if pop-up menu can be easily created using lua-gtk.
Ideally, we don't want multiple glyphs have the same input combination. The best case to design an IME is to make each glyph has its unique combination, but it not a easy task. An IME meeting the unique combination requirement may be too hard to learn.

Originally Posted by hansel

= How does one remember those key combinations? Is ther any form of visual feedback (wich would be ugly on the slow Iliad display)

All Chinese IME are created based on certain feature of Chinese glyphs, such as the shape or pronunciation of glyphs. If one person can recognize a glyph and speak it correctly, he can use Zhuying IME ,because each symbol of Zhuying IME is either a vowel or a consonant. This is only the case for Zhuying IME.

There are other IMEs created based on shape of glyphs. If a person can write Chinese glyphs, he can use those IMEs after learning the the rules behind each IME. That means, people don't have to remember the combination. The requirement of using a IME is being able to read or write Chinese glyphs and learn some rules of individual IME. The rules will differ for each IME, so most people just pick one or two IMEs that fit.

For Simplified Chinese, Pingying IME is the most popular. It uses the combination of pronunciation of English (or Roman) characters to map to pronunciation of a Chinese glyph. In a way, it's similiar to some Japanese IME. In fact, "Zhuying" and "Pingying" is the pronunciation.

As to visual feedback, definitely it exists for most circumstances.Take Zhuying IME for example, when a user type a key, say "J", there will be a small box showing the respective Zhuying symbol. When a combination is finished, a glyph will show up. If multiple glyphs have the same combination, a pop-up menu will come out for users to pick a glyph. Although this feature (visual feedback) is convenient, it is not a necessity. But a pop-up menu is a must-have. For skillful people, they don't have watch the screen to input correct glyphs.

[ericshliao]

Before providing Chinese IME with pop-up menu, I think MiniPad can be expanded to provide western language ,such as Greek, German, French, Russian text input using the similiar table as GCIN. It should be feasible since pop-up menu is not needed.
It's just my conjecture, since I don't know these languges.

Take French for example. by adding a button on MiniPad, users can switch between French and English text input. When switched to French text input, the keyboard will show French characters on keys instead of English characters. French characters will be read from the table supplied by the user.

[hansel]

For 1u4 the tables has almost 100 glyphs! do the all show in the popup?

[ericshliao]

Originally Posted by hansel

For 1u4 the tables has almost 100 glyphs! do the all show in the popup?

On Windows XP, we use spacebar to scroll the menu. The menu only shows ten items at most in a time.

Added:
It's not mandatory to use number keys to select and to use spacebar to scroll the menu. Maybe clicking on the respective button is more convenient for iLiad.