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Re: UTF-8 editor support in Debian?



Hi,

At Fri, 6 Jul 2001 22:04:35 +1000,
Drew Parsons <dparsons@emerall.com> wrote:

> The X keyboard selector would be the most appropriate to me (Gnome at
> least has a keyboard selector applet for switching between languages).
> It works great on the xterm console.  Is XIM an  native X selector?

Some languages such as Japanese and Chinese need thousands of letters.
(You may have heard that one CJK Ideograph corresponds to a word in
European languages.)  It is clear that usual keyboards have much less
keys than needed letters (even if we consider shift/ctrl/alt/altgr/...)
and, such huge keyboards would not be convenient (difficult to remember,
expensive, require large space, etc).  Thus, for such languages, we
use a special software to input letters.  Type a reading of letters/
words/sentences, then the software looks up a large dictionary and
shows candidates of correct letters.  Then the user chooses correct
one.

XIM is a protocol for such input mechanism.  XIM server is the special
software I wrote above.  All softwares which need i18n input should
have XIM client functionality.  XIM is standardized by X11R6.  There
are relatively small number of softwares which implements XIM client.

---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N"  http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/



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