Multilingual and Asian input methods

On Fri, Oct 21, 2005 at 04:30:03PM -0400, Edward H. Trager wrote:
> Hi, Jeff and all Ubuntu developers,

Hi Edward,

Glad to see you are very satisfied with SCIM.  I hope you are using the
packages shipped in Ubuntu instead of compiling yourself. :-)  But even
if you compiled yourself, I'd very like to invite you to test the new
SCIM 1.4 packages once we get them into dapper (and hopefully maybe
breezy-backports as well).

> I can guarantee that SCIM is *the* best choice and should be the base
> standard Input Method Engine (IME) for Ubuntu.  SCIM is written in
> modern C++ with a very nice API and is very stable.  Whatever segfault
> whoever found must have been an anomoly.

While I fully agree that SCIM has a very good design (it was designed to
be a input method framework for different engines, instead of only one
single input method), and it has the most clean code I've seen among
input methods, I must point out that C++ is a double-edged sword.  Part
of the reason it took so long to bring SCIM up-to-date in Debian is due
to it's involvment with the C++ ABI transition.  And altough it works
well for you (and for me), those segfaults are not anomolies.  The GTK+
IM module used in SCIM can cause very nasty segfaults when a GTK+ app
load both SCIM and some other C++ plugin, with linking to different
versions of libstdc++.  See Debian bug #323216 [1] if any one is
interesed, and especially read the mailing list thread [2] mentioned at
the end of the bug report.

1. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=323216
2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/09/msg00657.html

> Another *really* *really* useful feature of the more recent versions
> of SCIM is that I can now select an IM that I am comfortable with
> --such as SmartPinYin-- to type *either* *simplified* *or*
> *traditional* Chinese.  This is a super-convenience for me, and I am
> sure it is very convenient for native Chinese speakers too.

Edward, I would like to ask which Smart Pinyin version you are using.
If you are using 0.4.2, then this feature you are talking about is
specific to scim-chinese (the Pinyin engine for SCIM, renamed
scim-pinyin now).  However, in scim 1.4.1, there is indeed a new feature
which can do simplified (zh_CN) <-> traditional (zh_TW) conversion on
the fly, for any input method engine.  And that's indeed a much more
useful thing (though I must admit I haven't used it yet).

Ming
2005.10.21