SCIM and other language characters -- documentation?

[Christian Fröbel]

Hey Jonathan,

as I'm new to kubuntu it's good to see that someone is caring about 
documentation:)

Now I finally got skim/scim running following the instructions documented on 
the wiki-page Thilo Six pointed me at:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/InputMethods/SCIM/CJK_Chinese_Japanese_Korean_Input_Method_configuration_using_SCIM_in_Ubuntu_6%2e06_Dapper_Drake

But still I'm not able to input Latin characters using skim/scim.

I'm not the right person to contribute to the documentation in this case as 
I'm new to the topic. But maybe it helps if I tell you where I had problems.

Firstly, there seems to be a general lack of documentation out there. I 
searched the internet for decent docs but only got phony stuff. All I got was 
something like:

"Smart Common Input Method platform (SCIM) is an input method server and a 
development platform to make Input Method developers' lives easier."

This sentence seems to have been copied and pasted everywhere -- even into the 
package descriptions.

I need some kind of generel conceptual description. And along with this a 
clear definition of the terms Input Method and Input Method Engine. Also 
there seem to be conceptually different engines. Native scim engines and 
bridges. The bridges seem to "bridge" to a library, like uim.

What makes things worse is, that there seem to be almost parallel concepts out 
there. There is scim and XIM and Xorg's native composing input method. Up to 
know I still can't tell the difference between scim and XIM. What is XIM 
anyway? Some kind of deprecated stuff?

What is the difference between scim and skim?

Once I got it running I was wondering what all the options in the skim 
configuration dialog were good for.

And, the worst of all. Where is the documentation of input method engines. I'm 
still looking for docs of the UIM-latin engine. The UIM-latin engine seems to 
be part of the scim-uim bridge. And the documentation only refers to the 
documentation of the uim-library. That's nice, but doesn't help me.

I posted a request for documentation on UIM-latin on the mailing list 
uim at lists.freedesktop.org, but no response up to now.

regards,
  Christian