[SCIM] Inputting tone-correct Pinyin (not characters) with SCIM

David J.Oftedal david at start.no
Sun Dec 5 22:16:19 PST 2004


Well, when I say "dead keys", I mean keys that when typed in before 
another character, combine with the superceding character. Thus you'd 
need one key for each accent, for a total of 4 dead keys:

ˇ ̀ ́ ˉ

Admittedly, though, this would probably require a table-based input 
method. Some, if not all vowels have precomposed variants with pre-
added accents which you absolutely want to use (because they look 
way better on most systems), and if there are any vowels that don't 
have such a variant, they should have a pre-combining accent added 
after them.

Here are the pre-composed ones I could find via Google:

ā á ǎ à a
ē é ě è e
ī í ǐ ì i
ō ó ǒ ò o
ū ú ǔ ù u
ǖ ǘ ǚ ǜ ü

I guess the number keys 1-4 could actually be sacrificed to represent 
the accents, so that a1 would give you ā, or whatever letter 
it's supposed to yield.

Unfortunately, I'm not even on Linux at the moment, so I'm not sure 
it's possible for me to make such a table. Seems like a simple enough 
job, though.

-David Oftedal




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