openSUSE User Survey for Input Methods

English Open Chat
1

https://docs.google.com/a/marguerite.su/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dDdoMmU2emxaMXNxc0VfNTAxSTNfUEE6MQ

Hi, I made this survey because I’m a M17N maintainer, and I’m planning proposal for replacing our default input methods in DVD, which are scim/ibus, to other alternatives.

I have this idea because I’m one of CJK users ( in my mind, only CJK users need Input Method because western characters can be input using default or alternative keyboard settings with/without function keys), and the first thing after I freshly installed openSUSE is to uninstall them and install my favorite/popular input methods which are not distributed with ISOs but available in repositories like M17N. And I think this case is common.

so I wonder, why not replacing them by default to make our users easy and make us modern and fashionable? so I asked coolo, he said all I need is just to propose in factory mailing list and cc to related parts (IM maintainers and users interested in). but I think I have to be more precise about this issue. Because to many, we can survive without KDE or GNOME (but can’t live without them both!), but we can’t survive without input methods, it’s just like to eat nuts without hammers.

It’s critical. so I made this online survey to see if everyone is like me.

And here are the proposal (temporary):

replace scim/ibus or anyone of them (one or two) with fcitx, gcin, hime, mozc ( to four).

(in Linux)
fcitx: the most and only popular unix input method in Mainland, China. supports Simplified/Traditional Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese.

gcin/hime: the most popular unix input method in Taiwan, China. supports TC, partly SC.

mozc: the most popular input method in Japan. only supports Japanese.

I’ll modify the candidates according to proceeding result of this survey. (eg, if someone needs XXX for Spanish which is yet supported by scim/ibus, I’ll find his favorite and list it here for vote)

and don’t worry about the file sizes, because we’re now 4.7 GB, more than a traditional DVD/ USB stick.

2

As I normaly use Latin, I do not realy feel competent to comment here. And I guess many of those using “western” scripts feel the same.

Nevertheless this is an important subject and I applaude everything that wil improve the usage of Linux for those who use other scripts. Nowadays the encoding of the world’s different scripts is for internal representation in computers and for exchanging them between different systems is standardised with Unicode which is supported widely (certainly in Linux). The visual representation (glyphs) of the characters on screen and paper is supported by fonts available (also “open” ones) for I guess all of those being defined in Unicode. Thus to have easy to use ways of entering these characters is imminent for the end users.

Please to all who have any practical experience with entering “non-western”" characters into your system, help @MargueriteSu in her trial to improve this with your comments and support.