[sword-devel] input methods

[Matthew Talbert]

On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 11:39 PM, Chris Little <chrislit at crosswire.org> wrote:
> This is just a guess, but I suspect it is not being used anywhere by anyone.
> SWInputMethod was basically for customized input methods of a very basic
> sort. For example, input ' to the IM and get א out. (HebrewMCIM, if it isn't
> clear, takes Michigan-Claremont Hebrew encoding and outputs Unicode.) The
> use for this would be on systems without an OS-wide non-Latin IM switching
> method, or in the case where we just don't want to use or implement IMs
> using the OS-supplied methods.
>
> SWInputMethod could probably be implemented using ICU transliterators, which
> would likely be a bit slower and would add a requirement of using ICU. But
> doing so would mean not having to write a bunch of classes like HebrewMCIM
> for each IM we want to support.
>
> Troy can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the original purpose of
> SWInputMethod and HewbrewMCIM was for a collaborative editor for Project
> "eL" (cf. http://www.xml.com/pub/r/915).
>
> </historyLesson>
>
> If we really don't intend to use any of this any time soon, it would
> probably be a good idea to pull it out of the library, since it's just
> taking up space. Or maybe you had an idea for a use for it?
>

No, I don't really have a use for it, and I'm all for taking things
out that are clearly unmaintained and unused. I just stumbled across
it, and was curious about it.

I was thinking random thoughts the other day about allowing users to
input Greek using b-greek or things like that, but I don't know if
this would be at all helpful for that. It's probably better to just
provide an on-screen keyboard for greek/hebrew entry.

Matthew