Re: a few MULE criticisms

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

>>>>> "Hin-Tak" == Hin-Tak Leung <hintak_leung@yahoo.co.uk> writes:

    Hin-Tak> The more prefered methods are either
    Hin-Tak> pronounciation+intonation (which is probably "input 4
    Hin-Tak> keystrokes, scroll a list of 20")

Quail already offers at least one of these.

    Hin-Tak> There are a few methods which matches by shape (i.e. how

Quail offers a couple of these, too.

    Hin-Tak> a character is written), but as I explained, the right-
    Hin-Tak> hand-side of a chinese character is usually the more
    Hin-Tak> distinct side but the right half is usually written last;

I suppose it wouldn't help much for input methods to simply reverse
the order.  Then you'd still need wildcards for the (less frequent,
but not so rare) case where the left side is more distinctive, right?

    Hin-Tak> Also, it is not uncommon to switch between input methods
    Hin-Tak> frequently to arrive at different characters, say 5-10
    Hin-Tak> times within a medium-size sentence. Binding the switch
    Hin-Tak> to function keys to enable fast-switching is quite
    Hin-Tak> necessary to type at any reasonable speed.  (And Japanese
    Hin-Tak> users probably don't switch input methods as frequently
    Hin-Tak> as Chinese users would do...)

Note that in certain applications, such as programming code that
produces Japanese strings (eg, XML or TeX), the input method may be
toggled on and off many times in a medium sized "sentence".  But it
sounds like you mean several different methods, not (for example)
switching from geometric to phonetic and back several times.  So you'd
need several keybindings, instead of just one for the toggle.

Also it sounds like which methods are preferred varies a lot by user.
Is the number of commonly used methods small enough (say 5 or 6) that
all can be bound to function keys at once?  Or are there enough that
each user should be able to configure his own preferences to reduce
the number of hot-keys required?

In fact the server-based input methods for Japanese usually do provide
function key access to methods like a special list of symbols, input
via JIS code, user dictionary, etc.

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