[SCIM] SCIM and Wubi

[James Su]

Oh, yes, you are right. Now I understand. And the good news is, scim 
table module can handle this issue already. If you give me the 1-to-1 
table, I can try to make a dvorak-wubi table.

Regards
James Su

Ming Hua wrote:

>James, I think you misunderstood Alexander.  From my understanding, he
>has no problem setting his keyboard as Dvorak keyboard layout, and he
>has no problem using SCIM with his dvorak keyboard either.  The point
>is, it's very inconvenient.
>
>Wubi put similar parts of a character as a group (if I remember
>correctly, there are five groups, each group has five keys.  And the
>five groups are horizontal strokes, vertical stokes, etc.), and the keys
>for each group are put together on the keyboard (qwert, yuiop, asdfg,
>etc.), so it would be easier to remember the positions.  However, with a
>dvorak keyboard layout, the keys in the same group are spread out in the
>keyboard without any regularity.
>
>Since the parts represented by a Wubi key actually has nothing to do
>with the actually english character on it, it makes more sense to keep
>the keys in the same group together, regardless the actually english
>keyboard layout.  This way, Wubi users remember the keys by position on
>keyboard instead of the corresponding English character, and that's more
>intuitive.
>
>The problem is that in dvorak layout the characters and the punctuation
>symbols somehow changes positions, you can see the actual layout at
>    http://www.mwbrooks.com/dvorak/layout.html
>for example.  To keep the same Wubi layout, we need to group the keys as
>something like: ',.py fgcrl aoeui etc.  However in SCIM punctuation
>symbols are treated differently than characters.
>
>I see a straight forward way (it may still be hard, I haven't looked at
>the code yet) to solve this would be to allow punctuation symbols in
>scim-table IM engine, and then we can just generate a dvorak-wubi table
>by some simple 1-to-1 substitution, and all are set.  But from a
>long-term point of view, I agree with Alexander that allowing different
>xkb layout for different input method may be the right way to go.
>
>
>On Sun, Jul 04, 2004 at 09:05:09AM +0800, Zhe Su wrote:
>  
>
>>Hi,
>> I think the keyboard layout issue should be handled by XFree86 or
>>linux kernel. Did you set your keyboard type correctly in XFree86
>>configuration or linux configuration?
>> I know nothing about other linux distributions, but in SUSE Linux,
>>there is a config file /etc/sysconfig/keyboard, in which the keyboard
>>layout can be specified.
>>
>> Indeed, I know little about the keymap issue, does anybody know this
>>issue? Please give us more detailed information.
>>
>>Regards
>>James Su
>>
>>On Sat, 3 Jul 2004 01:40:01 -0700, Alexander Poquet <atp at csbd.org> wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>Hi folks.
>>>
>>>I recently moved from XCIN over to SCIM because it really has become a
>>>superior system.  Good work.
>>>
>>>However, I have a problem with the Wubi input method.  Usually I like
>>>to type with Wubi because it is fast.  When typing English, I use the
>>>dvorak keyboard layout for the same reason.
>>>
>>>The problem is that Wubi is a structural input method.  That is to say,
>>>the letter which is on the key is not important; rather, its position
>>>on the keyboard is important.  Those of you that type Wubi know that
>>>it divides the keyboard into 5 zones based on stroke, and further
>>>subdivides those zones based on the number of strokes.
>>>
>>>The problem is that because I use dvorak and not qwerty, the key in
>>>the 'q' position is not q, for example, it is an apostrophe (').
>>>Essentially all the keys are in completely different places.
>>>
>>>This makes Wubi very hard to type.
>>>It also makes it less efficient, because before all similar strokes
>>>were grouped together, but now they are scattered all over the
>>>keyboard.
>>>
>>>This was a problem in XCIN too.  What I did in XCIN was simply write
>>>a perl script to remap all the keys to dvorak, so a sequence like 'cex'
>>>would become 'j.q' (because the key in the c position is a j in dvorak,
>>>etc).  This worked fine, although it was an ugly hack.
>>>
>>>In SCIM, I cannot seem to do this.  Looking over the code for
>>>scim-make-table, it appears that punctuation characters are not allowed
>>>in the table.  This is a problem for dvorak keyboards.
>>>
>>>Now, I am not much of an X programmer, but the most elegant way to cope
>>>with this sort of problem is to somehow allow tables to bypass the
>>>higher levels of XKB and deal with keycodes directly.  I do not know
>>>how difficult this would be.
>>>
>>>Admittedly, dvorak is used by only a minority of people, but many non-
>>>qwerty layouts are in widespread use (AZERTY in France, for example).
>>>
>>>This annoys me enough that I would be willing to lend coding time to
>>>fix it.
>>>
>>>As far as I am concerned, any structural layout (ie, non-phonetic)
>>>should probably operate using key position rather than key value.  If
>>>I understand properly, X already provides us with the layout of the
>>>keyboard (physically) through XKB.
>>>
>>>As a disclaimer, I am a C programmer.  C++ has never been my thing. :)
>>>
>>>Alexander
>>>      
>>>
>
>Ming
>2004.07.03
>
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