[SCIM] Re: [immodule-qt] how about built-in dead key support?

[Hideki Hiura]

> From: LiuCougar <liucougar at gmail.com>
> What do you think if we incorporate the "dead key support" into scim-lib?

# I guess you may also want this discussion to be on scim ML?

> From: LiuCougar <liucougar at gmail.com>
> I mean we can write another simple table-based IMEngine for scim, and
> ship it with scim-lib. Another alternative way is to use the generic
> talbe IMEngine and supply the "dead key" tables with scim-lib. ( I
> prefer the later one)

Just FYI: The latter approach is what IIIMF does.

> Because I think, this kind of thing should be supported by scim-lib
> itself: scim-lib can have many frontends, not all of them have
> built-in support for dead keys (now qt-immodule does not have,

That's exactly what we thought for IIIMF. We don't need to handle
deadkey operation as a separate feature from IM.

> although we can add this feature in near future),

Ideally we shouldn't add such feature into qt-immodule or into any
frontends. You don't want to depend on or deal with the feature
like this in frontend side, as you can't manage integrity easily.

Here is an example from history.
X comes with XKB and Compose in Xlib. Back on late '90s, we've
initially extended Compose mechanism to work nicely with IIIMF so that
switching among the dead-key/Composition and other complex input such
as CJK smoothly for multilingual input support.  (Note: This
enhancement itself was released as XI18N, and X.org and XFree86 have
adopted already thus it's everywhere) However such approach did not
fix the integrity problem between X and other non-X environments, as
the mechanism is in X frontend, so we end up got rid of them.

> So I think it makes sense to build this feature into scim-lib itself.
> What's your opinion?

I would say you are on the right track!

--
hiura@{freestandards.org,OpenI18N.org,li18nux.org,unicode.org,sun.com} 
Chair, OpenI18N.org/The Free Standards Group          http://www.OpenI18N.org
Architect/Sr. Staff Engineer, Sun Microsystems, Inc, USA   eFAX: 207-433-8964