GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 687596
Nonfunctional "Chinese" input source
Last modified: 2013-04-19 12:05:23 UTC
One of the available input sources on my system is called "Chinese". It has no apparent effect: it functions identically to the default English input source. The "Chinese (Pinyin)" and "Chinese (Bopomofo)" input sources function as expected.
I guess "Chinese" is an XKB input source corresponding to the Chinese keyboard layout[1], which only contains ASCII letters. If so, we have similar issue for "Japanese" as well. While I proposed to add some indication to the input sources list to distinguish XKB and IBus[2], Allan seems to have more sophisticated idea to reorganize the input sources list. 1. gkbd-keyboard-display -l cn 2. http://ueno.fedorapeople.org/screenshots/input-source-icon.png
Could this input method (as well as "Japanese") simply be omitted from the list?
For "Chinese", maybe. For "Japanese", it has several different keysym assignments compared to the us layout. Check ";", ":", "@", "*", "^", and "~" on gkbd-keyboard-display -l jp. I don't know why, but there are quite a few people (including me) more familiar with jp layout than us.
That makes sense. Perhaps the "Chinese" input source could be removed, and the "Japanese" input source could be renamed to "Japanese (QWERTY)" to avoid confusion with Anthy (and other input methods that allow the user to enter actual Japanese characters)?
I wish that GNOME would name keyboard layouts correctly. Keyboard layouts/variants are largely national or de facto standards. They are/should be named after their country or territory of primary use. Chinese -> China <- (uncommon layout: China uses US layout) Japanese -> Japan <- (standard PC layout in Japan: jp106) English (US) -> US <- (standard layout in US and many other places: pc105) German -> Germany <- (standard de layout) etc The main problem here is that ibus Input Methods (IME's) really need to be distinguished or labelled in some way, either with text (eg "(default)") or an icon (either unique or generic). This will help users know which Input Source is recommended or the default for their language.
In 3.8 we are now clearly marking Input Methods with an icon. (The icon itself might not be the best though...) As for the bug at hand here I recommend you to file a bug on xkeyboard-config in freedesktop's bugzilla since that's where all the layouts are specified.