Re: Unicode character entry

[Simos Xenitellis <simos lists googlemail com>]

On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 1:00 AM, Joe Smith <jes martnet com> wrote:
> On 05/31/2010 05:14 PM, Simos Xenitellis wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 11:41 PM, Joe Smith<jes martnet com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> ...
>>> Thanks for any suggestions or information.
>>
>> The Ctrl+Shift+U feature is an ISO 14755 compliance by the GTK+ input
>> method. See more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_input
>>
>> I suppose that the IBus input method does not support ISO 14755.
>> Since you use Fedora, have a look at the Fedora bugzilla on IBus ...
>
> Good suggestion; I meant to check there also.
>
> Now that I've done so, I don't see anything that looks terribly relevant.
>
>> To answer your question on who to blame; this should be something that
>> IBus should support in addition to the GTK+ library default input
>> method.
>>
>> Normally you would use IBus if you want to write in complex scripts,
>> notably Asian scripts. For anything Latin-based you can use a layout
>> such as US English International, which allows to write characters
>> such as äǵẽëēę··÷ṩłeđŋ”“nµ»«þø²¹€½¾.
>
> Yes, of course.
>
> I'm not necessarily against using ibus, as long as it just does what I need
> and is as transparent otherwise as the old method. That seems rather
> inefficient, since the old method was working just fine without any ibus at
> all, but as long as it works, who cares?
>
> What I would not feel so good about is replacing a simple, useful, working
> feature with yet another large, complex subsystem that I don't need and
> don't understand (and don't want to).

The purpose of IBus is to accommodate special scripts with complex
writing rules, which are a handful, such as Chinese, Korean, Japanese
and Burmese.
All other scripts, such as anything Latin-based, Cyrillic, Greek,
Thai, Arabic, etc stay for the foreseeable future with the default
input method, based on GTK+ (for gtk+ applications).
Apart from Fedora, Ubuntu uses IBus if the user specifically selects
to write in one of the 'complex scripts'.

IBus does not replace what you get with gtk+ so I would not consider
the 'non-IBus' input method as old. The precise wording would be that
IBus is special, and is to be used for those cases that require
complex writing systems, such as Chinese.

IBus replaces something called SCIM.

The keyboard layouts found in System/Preferences/Keyboard/Layouts come
from the X.Org project (generic GUI project for Linux systems) and are
used by default by both GNOME and KDE applications. GNOME applications
have Ctrl+Shift+U, and I think that KDE applications have a similar
shortcut, which are independently implemented.
Both GNOME and KDE programs can be switched so that they work with the
IBus input method (select in Settings and re-login), which in this
case the System/Preferences/Keyboard/Layouts are replaced with the
IBus keyboard layouts.

> I know that's part of Fedora's bleeding edge nature, so I'm not complaining,
> just trying to find out what the plan is.
>
> I guess I should have thought to hunt up the ibus list as well--duh!

It would be great if you can ask the list, in an effort to lead to a
bug report on RedHat's bugzilla. Input methods are a geeky, so if it
doesn't get registered in bugzilla, it will probably be forgotten for
a long time.

Hope this helps,
Simos