List ibus-cangjie for Chinese (Taiwan) locale in GNOME Settings

[zerng07]

Cangjie is the third popular input method in Taiwan.

If you go into a bookstore and find for books talking about input methods in the Information Technology/Computer Science block, you will see most books are about bopomofo, noseeing and cangjie.

Cangjie 3 is the most popular one. DaXin Cangjie (which is modified from Canjie 3 by a information company, and getting more and more popular nowadays) is the second while Cangjie 5 is the last but not the least one.

Below is a list sorted by numbers of sales from a web bookstore. It could be a reference to verify the popularity is true. http://www.kingstone.com.tw/book/book_class.asp?class_id=LGA (in Chinese)

I think it it better to list ibus-cangjie for Chinese (Taiwan) locale in GNOME settings too.

By the way, DaXin Cangjie is regarded as the fastest input method for Chinese characters in Taiwan since 2007. I will file another issue for supporting DaXin Cangjie in the future.

gcin input method engine team is maintaining a table for Daxin Cangjie.
Link: http://cle.linux.org.tw/trac/wiki/FreeNewCJCin (in Chinese)

Note: Daxin means "Brand New" in English.

[bochecha]

Thanks for the suggestion, if Cangjie is widely-used in Taiwan then we should definitely appear under « Chinese (Taiwan) » in GNOME Settings.

I'm looking at how to do that, not sure yet.

Note that our primary target users are still Hong Kong people, but as long as it doesn't conflict, we'll try to support Taiwan people as well. :-)

[bochecha]

I just talked about this in #ibus on Freenode:

<bochecha> rtcm: actually I do have an idea: is that picked up from the <language> tag in the XML component file?
<rtcm> bochecha: yes, it's from that tag
<bochecha> rtcm: ok, thanks
<bochecha> so I guess my question now becomes a more general question about ibus xml files, and how to support multiple languages
<rtcm> there's no way to make it appear in just 2 places though
<bochecha> rtcm: oh?
<rtcm> what you can do atm, is just specify the language without the country
<bochecha> ah, so "zh"
<rtcm> and then it should appear under all locales for that language, i.e. all the 3 cn_** locales
<rtcm> ah yes, zh, sorry
<bochecha> I see
<bochecha> is that a limitation in ibus or in g-c-c?
<rtcm> just g-c-c
<rtcm> hmm, actually I don't think the ibus api gives us more than one locale string though
<rtcm> so also ibus yeah
<bochecha> :(
<rtcm> I gues you could install 2 XML files
<rtcm> ungly but that should work
<rtcm> you could even have slightly different defaults that way
<bochecha> but then they need to have a different <name> as well
<rtcm> depending on HK or TW
<bochecha> yeah, we might want to go that road one day, but for now I'd rather avoid it if possible ;)
<rtcm> I gues tthe user visible description can be the same
<bochecha> yes, the <longname> can be the same
<bochecha> my initial reaction was to just try setting the language to zh_HK,zh_TW
<bochecha> but that didn't work :)
<bochecha> would that be an acceptable change in ibus?
<bochecha> (and that's not just addressed to you rtcm, but to the channel in general :) )
<rtcm> perhaps, if it's acceptable for ibus, then g-c-c is easy to change

So basically, that's a tough one. :-(

We have a few possibilities here:

1. Keep the status quo, ibus-cangjie is only listed under "Chinese (Hong Kong)"

   => This basically mean we mark this bug report as WONTFIX, which is not ideal, for obvious reasons.

2. Have ibus-cangjie listed under all the "Chinese (*)" languages

   => This has the advantage of being entirely trivial to do.
   => I'm not really convinced this would be a good thing, though.

3. Implement the needed change in IBus and GNOME Settings, then take advantage of it in IBus Cangjie

   => This requires more work, and it is not clear that the IBus developers would even want it.
   => In any case, this would mean that this would only work with a very recent version of IBus and GNOME Settings, which is pretty bad (we currently support older systems, by design)

4. Ship one engine definition per language

   => This has the potential to be a non-trivial change in IBus Cangjie

Option number 1 is the obvious "worst case scenario" fallback here, as it's what we have right now. But I'd really like to fix this issue. :)

Option number 3 is pretty much disqualified, as it would force us to abandon compatibility with systems like Ubuntu 12.04, which I'd really like we keep supporting as long as we can. (Ubuntu 12.04 is pretty much the limit on how ancient I'm willing to go)

Option number 4 is interesting, as it would allow us to have different defaults for different locations.

For example, the default version for Hong Kong could be version 3, but the default version for Taiwan could be DaXin, if we ever add support for it and if it ever becomes the most popular in Taiwan. Or, the characters we return by default could be different between Taiwan and Hong Kong, etc...

However, that's definitely NOT a change I'd consider for milestone 2.1, more like a 3.0 change, as it would be quite a big change.

That leaves option 2 as a bad choice, but which has the merit of being trivial to implement.

Need to think some more on this one...

One last thing, @zerng07 , is it only Cangjie which is widely used in Taiwan? Or is Quick also popular there?

[zerng07]

Yeah, only Cangjie is widely used. Quick is rarely used in Taiwan. I have never seen books or tutorials in Taiwan talking about Quick.