[Uim] [Docs] Terminology problems

Martin Swift martin at swift.is
Mon Feb 5 16:17:15 EET 2007


Dear uim developers,

Sorry for being out of touch for so long and leaving the documentation
in such a sorry state. Now that I've settled down a bit and found an
Internet connection to access through, I'm hoping to do a little more
work on this.

Editing some draft pages, I've stumbled across a number of issues that
I'm unsure about. Following are a couple of these that I'd really like
clarified so that the documentation doesn't end up as confused as I'm
at this point.

1. "Conversion engine", "input module" and "input method"

These (and possibly others as well) seem to be used interchangeably,
though it may simply be a misunderstanding on my part. Specifically,
I've seen different documments on uim-fep use each of these terms for
'Anthy'. This is very confusing.

My current best understanding from reading the available docs is that
each of these refers to the ruleset used to do the conversion and, in
the case of ambiguity (arising from homophones), supply candidates to
libuim to display for the user to choose from.

Can anyone clarify these terms?

2. Input levels (no idea what your term for this is)

It seems that uim has three "levels" of input.
 1) Firstly, there is the thing mentioned above (direct/anthy/skk/...
etc.).
 2) Secondly there is the preedit text (in the case of Anthy, this
seems to be romanji (latin), hiragana, katakana, half-width katakana,
half-width romanji (though I'm not quite sure what the use of this
is), and full width romanji).
 3) Finally, there seems to be a choice between keyboard layouts.
There are three under Anthy: ローマ字, かな and AZIK.

I've found nothing in the existing documentation that discusses these
levels of input. Are they Anthy specific? Can anyone give me pointers
on these? I'm starting to fear that I may be grossly underqualified to
write some parts of the docs :-(

That's it for now (should keep me busy for a bit),
Martin

-- 
\u270C



More information about the uim mailing list