On Wed, 28 Nov 2001, Marco Cimarosti wrote: > Handled this way, the abstract characters become something similar to the > keystrokes of a CJK input method: you press many keys, and you get a single > blob. Once this blob (an ideograph) is on your screen, you can keep it or > delete it, but you have no way of going back and change it slightly.
What you wrote above may be true of Chinese characters, but not hold for syllables made up of consonants and vowels. For instance, MS IME for Korean (Windows 9x/NT/2k/XP) has an option for 'deletion by Jaso unit' (where Jaso means consonants and vowels). However, this is only activated for a 'syllable in forming'. Whether this option is turned on or not, the cursor movement over and deletion of what's already committed is by syllable unit, which is reasonable. However, someone could argue that it'd be better if turning on 'deletion by Jaso' means deletion by Jaso (always) AND cursor movement by syllable. Implementing this for Korean may be a bit more (but not much) complicated than for Indic scripts if Korean is internally represented with precomposed forms instead of conjoining jamos. Pani wrote: > Words using Indic scripts are made of syllables. A word like > "prajnyenaatmanaasmaallokaadutkramyamusminsvarge" is made of syllables > like "pra + jnye + naa + tma + naa + smaa + llo + kaa + du + tkra + > mya + mu + smi + nsva + rge". As agreed by all, when one makes a > mistake in a relatively small word like arjun, one would delete the > whole word and retype. And if one makes a mistake in any syllable of a > word like the above, one could as well move to the syllable and delete > it and retype. The rule holds true for all, be it Indic or Latin. The > difference is that in linear scripts, each character is a unit and in > complex scripts, a syllable is a unit. I think this is right on the mark. I think it isn't that hard to correct a mistake in a syllable in the middle of a word of 10 or 20 or however many syllables. Moving over the cursor to the beginning (or the end) of a syllable you want to correct, deleting the syllable in question and retyping it doesn't seem to be a much hassle as far as syllable boundaries are clear (on the screen) to make the cursor movement by syllable with cursor keys or putting the pointer at the syllable boundary easy. However, there's a big 'if' here. Is there any implementation that treats syllables as a unit for Indic scripts? It seems like allowing deletion by consonant/vowel as a unit *only during* syllable formation and treating syllables as a unit when dealing with what's already committed (as done for Korean case mentioned above) is a good idea. It might be better to have what Dhrubajyoti Banerjee and Marco suggested: deletion by letter and movement by syllable (with optional finer/more coarse movement assigned other key-combinations). MS Word seems to do that when Hindi keyboard is selected. Adding (optional) deletion by syllable appears to make Marco's problem 'moot', doesn't it? BTW, is there any 'input method' for Indic scripts to expedite occasional input of Indic scripts by *non-native* speakers of languages represented by them? It occurred to me that something similar to Romaji input for Japanese might be useful to non-native speakers. I typed in names of some Indian scientists with 4 hex-digit code points followed by Alt-X in MS Win 2k and it was very inconvenient as you can imagine. I know Win 2k has Hindi keyboard support, but it wouldn't have helped me much because I have to look up TUS 3.0 anyway to map Latin transliteration (or is it close to transcription? It seems like for Hindi there might not be much difference between two) to Devanagari letters. Jungshik Shin
