A comment about pyunihan (Re: [Uim] Should we have a stable branch?)

[Jon Babcock]

Duncan Mak wrote:

> With the 0.3.6 release, I can finally try the new pyunihan 
> IME. In general, it works, it really gives me a LOT of kanjis
>  to choice from. However, the available ordering of the kanji
>  is quite funky -- it seems like Vietnamese kanjis (unique to
>  only Vietnam) are always showing up first. For a simple test
>  of typing ni hao ma (你好嗎), ni is the 31st choice, hao the 
> 34th choice, and ma the 19th choice (the simplified version 
> at 17) I guess it works, but it feels very tedious (and 
> funky!) to weed thru all these strange, exotic-looking, 
> Vietnamese kanjis.

At least you can see the kanji for those. On my system they are
font-less, and just show up as their Unicode number. What font
are you using? What system?

After the initial list of those new additions, the kanji in
pyunihan are arranged according to classifier (usually called
'radical') and stroke count. So the list is not random, but
impractical for most of us, nevertheless.

As I suggested in earlier messages, pyunihan is aimed at
students, scholars, and amateur scholars (like me) who want to
include small handfuls of Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese
characters as book titles, short sayings, names, key words and
technical terms in our writing. Pyunihan is not intended to be a
practical IME for someone who wants to actually write more than
a few lines in any one of those languages. It is intended to
help produce multilingual CJKV documents that are probably
written in English or another Western European language.

(Since UIM makes is easy to switch from one IME to another,
the availability under UIM of superior quality IMEs for each 
individual language may obviate the need for pyunihan. But in 
the meantime there are thousands of characters that are simply 
not accessible by an existing alternative method, afaik.)

I intend to improve pyunihan to make it easier to find the
character you are looking for. (Some of the candidate lists now
have more than 400 characters! Type in 'ji', for example; 450
candidates pop up!) I will not have time to work on this until 
next month, unfortunately.

Jon

--
Jon Babcock