FW: [A CJK IME for full Unicode]

["McDonald, Ira" <imcdonald@sharplabs.com>]

Hi,

This note came from Free Software Group's Linux/I18N list.

It describes work on complete coverage of Unicode 1.0 CJK in
a _single_ language-independent IME (Input Method Editor) for
Linux.  And future consideration of the A and B extensions
(in more recent Unicode versions).

Recent Charset discussions about UTF-8 [RFC 2279bis] have shown
concern about complete support of the Unicode CJK assignments.
This is hopeful news.

Cheers,
- Ira McDonald
  High North Inc


-----Original Message-----
From: Edward Cherlin [mailto:cherlin@pacbell.net]
Sent: Saturday, March 29, 2003 10:01 PM
To: linux-utf8@nl.linux.org
Subject: Re: supporting XIM


On Friday 28 March 2003 08:33 am, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote:
...
> Japanese people need multiple input modules.  This is because
> Japanese conversion is too complex for a software to perfectly
> achieve it.
...
> How about Korean?
>
> ---
> Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
> http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/

Korean in both South Korea and North Korea is mostly written in 
straight Hangul, without hanja or Latin alphabet. There is a 
occasional need for Hangul-hanja conversion and other IMEs, but 
switching is far less frequent than in Japanese.

North Korea did not allow the use of hanja for a long time, but 
has relaxed the prohibition. When I was in South Korea in the 
1960s, hanja were used in most publications, but they have 
fallen out of everyday use.

There has been some work toward a language-independent IME. Zhu 
Bongfu, inventor of the shape-based Cangjie IME for Chinese 
started out with only Big5/Traditional Chinese, but his most 
recent version has extensions for Simplified Chinese. He has 
someone working on a version to cover the Unicode 1.0 Han 
repertoire (basically Unified CJK Ideographs). After that, he is 
considering what to do about the A and B extensions, and 
proposals to add at least 50,000 more historical CJK characters.

Somebody else did a Cangjie IME for Japanese, but I don't know 
anybody who uses it.
-- 
Edward Cherlin
Generalist & activist--Linux, languages, literacy and more
"A knot! Oh, do let me help to undo it!"
--Alice in Wonderland

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