Re: word boundaries in Asian languages

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>
> Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2013 18:26:20 +0800
> 
> I use emacs for prose more than for programming, and I've been idly
> fiddling with making it a better environment for editing other
> languages, particularly Asian languages, particularly Chinese prose.
> 
> One of the really awkward things about editing Chinese prose in Emacs is
> that word boundaries are bound to spaces -- in a language that doesn't
> use spaces to delineate words, movement and editing commands are thus
> restricted either to per-character, or per-punctuated-phrase. It's
> unwieldy.
> 
> Accurately identifying word boundaries in Chinese is a subject of
> academic research, but a couple of C libraries have emerged (I've pasted
> a couple of likely links at the bottom).
> 
> Given that this level of programming is _way_ above my pay grade, I
> raise the following totally hypothetical scenario. How likely is this:

The right place to discuss this is emacs-devel, not here.

> 1. I call "forward-word" (or some equivalent word-based command)
> 2. Emacs checks a variable like use-multilingual-words, or something to 
>    that makes all the following optional.
> 3. It's true, so we check the script of the following character, and try
>    a lookup in a variable that pairs scripts with C libraries that
>    provide word-level commands for those scripts.
> 4. A library is present! Instead of the usual "forward-word", we now
>    call a function from that library to identify the next word boundary.
>    Point goes either to that spot, or to the end of a contiguous run of
>    characters of the same script that we started in.
> 
> So external C libraries would have to be augmented with functions that
> did word boundary location in a way that made sense to emacs, but
> presumably the hard work would have already been done. Given my general
> ignorance, how unlikely is all of this?

A couple of comments:

 . we already have large dictionaries in Emacs, the ones Leim input
   methods use; perhaps they could serve double duty for matching text
   to words

 . there's also UAX#29 (http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/)