GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 680840
Allow Hong Kong users to input Chinese with GNOME
Last modified: 2013-04-20 09:44:54 UTC
In its current implementation, GNOME Control Center has a whitelist of Input Methods to show. None of those are appropriate for Hong Kong users. For GNOME to be usable in Hong Kong, it must support what the overwhelming majority of Hong Kong people use: [1] - Cangjie 3 [2] - Quick 3 [2] We (the Hong Kong Linux / GNOME community) believe that GNOME should also support the "latest and greatest" versions [3] of those two input methods, to prepare for the future when users start migrating to it (mostly because school will start teaching them instead at some point [4]). This means that GNOME should also include the following: - Cangjie 5 - Quick 5 We believe that including those 4 input methods would cover more than 95% of the Hong Kong people. I need to stress on the word "people" here, as this is really about everybody, not just "existing GNOME or Linux users". Due to their designs, both of those input methods can be used to input 3 different languages [5]. The respective IBus-Table implementations have a filter setting to control for which of those three languages the candidates will be (or all of them). [6] Finally, there is a 5th input method which should be included: Stroke 5. Although it is used by very few people, it is incredibly important for them as it allows the elderly and people with poor hand mobility. [7] As a result of the above, here is our proposal for what should appear in the list of available input methods in GNOME Control Center: [...] Traditional Chinese (Cangjie) Traditional Chinese (Cangjie Classic) Traditional Chinese (Quick) Traditional Chinese (Quick Classic) Traditional Chinese (Stroke 5) [...] We couldn't find anything better than "Classic" to express the idea that it's an older version ("Legacy" has negative connotations in Chinese). Note that IBus also has a "QuickClassic" input method which is something different (and should probably be considered obsolete these days). The above input methods should correspond (in this order) to the following in IBus parlance: - Cangjie5 - Cangjie3 - Quick5 - Quick3 When the user selects one of these, it should make the corresponding input method available, **AND** set its filter to only suggesting Traditional Chinese candidates. You can not count on the IBus Table default, as it will most likely be wrong: - at the moment, the default filter depends on the locale, which is completely useless for such a multicural place as Hong Kong - in the future the default **for Cangjie and Quick** will be set to "Big", which really means "all three languages". It hardly seems like a good user experience to see candidates in Japanese when you select a Chinese input method in the GNOME Control Center The IBus filter can be controlled over DBus, the appropriate value for Traditional Chinese being "1": org.freedesktop.IBus.Config.SetValue("engine/Table/Cangjie5", "ChineseMode", 1) org.freedesktop.IBus.Config.SetValue("engine/Table/Cangjie3", "ChineseMode", 1) org.freedesktop.IBus.Config.SetValue("engine/Table/Quick5", "ChineseMode", 1) org.freedesktop.IBus.Config.SetValue("engine/Table/Quick3", "ChineseMode", 1) Note that Stroke 5 was designed only for Traditional Chinese, so there is no need to set the IBus filter to any specific value. We believe this would provide the simplest UX in GNOME Control Center for Hong Kong people: - it provides what most people want right now (the "Classic" variant or version 3), while gently encouraging them to move to the "future-proof" version, called simply "Cangjie" or "Quick" - it hides the version numbers, which nobody knows or care about (people only know "like Windows") - it only gives candidate in the language that people care about: Traditional Chinese, hiding the implementation detail of the filter, and removing the need for the user to manually set it to the right value References: [1] http://bochecha.fedorapeople.org/chinese_ims/#what-people-use [2] http://bochecha.fedorapeople.org/chinese_ims/#cangjie-and-quick [3] http://bochecha.fedorapeople.org/chinese_ims/#different-versions [4] http://bochecha.fedorapeople.org/chinese_ims/#schools-and-education [5] http://bochecha.fedorapeople.org/chinese_ims/#multiple-languages [6] http://bochecha.fedorapeople.org/chinese_ims/#gnome-3 [7] http://bochecha.fedorapeople.org/chinese_ims/#stroke5
Created attachment 220314 [details] [review] Add the input methods used in Hong Kong To start moving forward, here is a patch that adds the relevant input methods to the whitelist. However, it is still far from sufficient to fix this bug. First of all, with this patch applied, the input methods appear as follows: Chinese (cangjie3) Chinese (cangjie5) Chinese (quick3) Chinese (quick5) Chinese (stroke5) This is not good: 1. Cangjie and Quick can be used to input both Simplified and Traditional Chinese, as well as Japanese, so a Hong Kong user will have a bad experience because he will get suggestions in other languages than the one he is interested in 2. Japanese users wanting to use Cangjie or Quick will not find it in the list (why would they choose something that says "Chinese"?), but it seems they are very few, and I guess they could open the same kind of bug report if they wanted a good support in GNOME ;) 3. it shows the version number, which is an uninformative implementation detail we should just hide away (apart from the geeks who have been studying the details of Cangjie/Quick nobody has any idea what those version numbers are) 4. Stroke 5 only works for Traditional Chinese, so it would be better to just say it explicitly (although I guess people who want to use Stroke 5 will search for it and won't bother too much) But at least, it allows Hong Kong users to actually input Chinese in GNOME, which is impossible without this patch. :) (unless they fiddle with the jungle of terrible IBus setup tools) However, I don't see how we could make it any better with the very simple whitelist approach we have right now. :-/
(In reply to comment #1) > Created an attachment (id=220314) [details] [review] > Add the input methods used in Hong Kong > > To start moving forward, here is a patch that adds the relevant input methods > to the whitelist. > > However, it is still far from sufficient to fix this bug. > > First of all, with this patch applied, the input methods appear as follows: > Chinese (cangjie3) > Chinese (cangjie5) > Chinese (quick3) > Chinese (quick5) > Chinese (stroke5) > > This is not good: > 1. Cangjie and Quick can be used to input both Simplified and Traditional > Chinese, as well as Japanese, so a Hong Kong user will have a bad experience > because he will get suggestions in other languages than the one he is > interested in > 2. Japanese users wanting to use Cangjie or Quick will not find it in the list > (why would they choose something that says "Chinese"?), but it seems they are > very few, and I guess they could open the same kind of bug report if they > wanted a good support in GNOME ;) > 3. it shows the version number, which is an uninformative implementation detail > we should just hide away (apart from the geeks who have been studying the > details of Cangjie/Quick nobody has any idea what those version numbers are) > 4. Stroke 5 only works for Traditional Chinese, so it would be better to just > say it explicitly (although I guess people who want to use Stroke 5 will search > for it and won't bother too much) 5. The default in IBus-Table is to only offer Simplified Chinese characters as candidates [8], which completely defeats the point of this bug report (see the part about setting the ChineseMode filter to "1" in comment 0) [8] At least until the upstream bug is fixed: https://code.google.com/p/ibus/issues/detail?id=1188
The patch I provided earlier will be obsolete once bug 682313 is fixed.
Comment on attachment 220314 [details] [review] Add the input methods used in Hong Kong This patch is now obsolete, bug 682313 has added the required input methods to GNOME Control Center.
(In reply to comment #4) > (From update of attachment 220314 [details] [review]) > This patch is now obsolete, bug 682313 has added the required input methods to > GNOME Control Center. Cool, I'll close it as a dupe then. Please file new bugs if there's any new problems. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 682313 ***
No, this bug is not resolved. The purpose was not only to have the proper input methods appear in the GNOME Control Center, but also to have them appear in a way that makes sense for the users, with correct defaults for some options to pass to IBus. Only the first part was implemented in bug 682313, but the rest is still to be done. Sorry if comment 4 wasn't clear, comment 0 has all the details.
(In reply to comment #6) <snip> > Sorry if comment 4 wasn't clear, comment 0 has all the details. It really wasn't. Having to read a page and a half just to figure out whether a problem is still there really isn't very useful. Hopefully Rui will get to it soon.
I have to admit I had a bit forgotten about this bug report, given all that has happened since then in this area. :) So, going back on what I described above point by point... 1. First there was the point about the language, because « Chinese » was too vague (there are at least two different written Chinese). I had suggested the usage of « Traditional Chinese » above, but since then the design evolved (for the better) and instead we have « Chinese (Hong Kong) », which also satisfies the need perfectly. 2. Next was the issue of which engines to include, and given that the whitelist was removed, this is now completely moot. 3. Another point was which versions of Cangjie and Quick to bring forward, but this also got away with the whitelist, as well as the work we did on IBus Cangjie (more on that below). 4. Last but not least, there was this problem with the default filter to set in IBus Table. This is a problem in IBus Table which we are overcoming with a new IBus engine, dedicated to the input of Chinese with Cangie and Quick, and focused primarily (but not exclusively) on Traditional Chinese for Hong Kong people (by far the majority of Cangjie and Quick users). IBus Cangjie doesn't have this problem with its filter, so this point is also gone. So basically, I do not believe that there is anything left in GNOME which causes specific problems to Hong Kong people, the redesigns of the input method handling of G-C-C and G-S for 3.8 have solved these issues, and the work on IBus Cangjie is taking care of the non-GNOME parts. I should probably have come back earlier to close this bug, sorry about that. I'm closing it now though, thank you very much to all the people who have worked on this, GNOME is finally becoming a great OS for Hong Kong people. :)