----- Forwarded message from Chris Meadors <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -----
From: Chris Meadors <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Andreas Beck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: keyboard events
> I don't know from experience. The way people explained it to me, it is
like
> entering the vocal expression by the keyboard and you will then get a list
> of all possible symbols that sound this way (but have different meaning of
> course ...) ...
I have experience with the Japanese version of Windows.
Actually there are 3 (4 counting Romaji) writing systems in Japan. 2 sets
of 46 phonetic symbols called hiragana and katakana. Hiragana is usually
used for writing words borrowed from English. Katakana is learned as the
first writing system for children (like printing vs. cursive) and also when
a person doesn't know the Kanji for a word (which can make you look
foolish). And as I just mentioned the last character set is Kanji which are
1945 ideographic symbols borrowed from Chinese (which has many, many more
symbols). So there are usually 3 ways of writing a word that are more or
less correct, but one is usually prefered.
It isn't so much the "vocal" expression as the Romaji (Roman letters)
spelling of the word (or glyph). As you type the Romaji the letters show up
(with a dotted underline so you know which letters are still being edited).
After you have built the word that you want, you press the space bar. This
causes the most often common (the dictionary has this ranking, but there is
a user defined dictionary that keeps track of the user's most used words
also) glyph to replace the characters you typed. Pressing the spacebar
again chooses the next most common symbol, the third press advances to the
3rd most likely choice. The 4th press is where is changes. After the forth
press a small window pops up with all possible choices (the 4th most likely
is preselected). You can then use the spacebar or down arrow to move down
the list, and the backspace key (note: the backspace key also steps back
through the list of the first 3 most likely before the full list pops up) or
the up arrow to move up the list. The enter key or starting to type a new
character picks the currently selected glyph, also before the list pops up
typing a letter after the first spacebar press starts a new character.
There are a few more little things that would take a long time to explain.
If anyone is planning on implimenting this please feel free to contact me
and I'll try to explain everything in as much detail as you need.
> The problem seems to exist with the languages that have a huge number of
> characters/symbols. As you can't get them onto a reasonably sized
keyboard,
> you use a reduced keyboard that can somehow express the vocal properties
> and a database lookup that will give all possible chars that sound this
way.
>
> One probably has to see this live to fully understand how it works. Anyone
> here that works with such a system, who could give some first hand
knowledge
> ?
Well obviously, yes, I do. But if anyone else wants to try this out and
doesn't mind suffering Windows. Internet Explorer and Outlook Express 4 and
5 have an addon called IME (Input Method Editor). These IMEs are available
for most Eastern languages, unfortuinatly the help files for the IMEs are
written in the language that they are designed to write.
Anyway as I said, ask me any questions and I'll try to answer them.
----- End forwarded message -----
--
= Andreas Beck | Email : <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> =
