On Thu, 2 May 2002, Glenn Maynard wrote: > I wrote the patch for PuTTY to accept input from Win2K's IME, and some > fixes for Vim's. What I said is all that's necessary for simple > support, and the vast majority of applications don't need any more than > that. > > Of course, what you do with this input is up to the application, and if > you have no support for storing anything but text in the system codepage, > there might be a lot of work to do. That's a different topic entirely, > of course. > > > It just occurred to me that Mozilla.org has an excellent summary > > of input method supports on three major platforms (Unix/X11, MacOS, > > MS-Windows). See > > > > http://www.mozilla.org/projects/intl/input-method-spec.html. > > I've never seen any application do anything other than what this > describes as "Over-The-Spot composition". This includes system dialogs, > Word, Notepad and IE. > > This document incorrectly says: > > "Windows does not use the off-the-spot or over-the-spot styles of input." > > As far as I know, Windows uses *only* "over-the-spot" input. Perhaps > on-the-spot can be implemented (and most people would probably agree > that it's cosmetically better), but it would proably take a lot more > work. > > Ex: > http://zewt.org/~glenn/over1.jpg > http://zewt.org/~glenn/over2.jpg > > (The rest of the first half of the document describes input styles that > most programs don't use.) The document states "Last modified May 18, > 1999", so the information on it is probably out of date. > > The only other thing you have to handle is described in "Platform > Protocols": WM_IME_COMPOSITION. The other two messages can be ignored. > > The only API function listed here that's often needed is SetCaretPosition, > to set the cursor position.
I also found it easy to program the input method for my Windows port of Yudit. What I could not figure out how to do simple things like setting backround and foreground color of the input method window . My guess is that you can not set it programmatically on Windows - on X11 it is trivial. What X needs is: o Library with a simple interface for pluggable input methods, with good docs, so that anyone could contribute easily. The number of input methods will grow inversely proportinally to the work that needs to be done to develop one input method. For instance, making the input method one single text file encouraged Yudit users to contribute over 80 input maps so far. The development time required is important. People usually write just a few input methods for the scripts they know - if has a steep learning curve they might not even start. I did look at IIMF: http://www.li18nux.org/subgroups/im/IIIMF/index.html and tried to make it work - but it required too much time so I gave up. o A collection of input methods that can be transparently activated and could pass utf-8 input string from any of its input methods, selectable programmatically, or even from an external GUI of the input method collection. This way we could avoid restaring naive programs with a new XMODIFIERS variable. Cheers gaspar -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
