[Tux4kids-tuxtype-dev] Working on the Chinese version of tuxtype

[David Bruce]

Hi,

> I have another question related to the Chinese input method (there are
> actually a few): we're started with the one called pinyin and this is
> how it works:
> 1. Each Chinese character has a phonetic equivalent using the English
> alphabet. In order to type in pinying one then need to master the qwerty
> layout which is in use on Chinese computer.
> 2. A combination of the same 2 or 3 English letters often results in a
> choice of many characters. For exemple 'shi' has 68 possibilities. Some
> have far less.
> 3. It is (almost) always a combination of several letters which produces
> a real Chinese character. So all the basic exercise using asdf... are
> fine (my point is that there is no equivalence between 1 keystroke to 1
> character).
> 4. Now for games with words falling like Fish cascade and comet zap
> words will be composed of 2-3 letters maximum which will be equivalent
> to 2 times 2-3 keystrokes or 3 times 2-3 keystrokes plus a selection of
> the right character (using the arrow keys or numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd
> ,etc.)). Likewise for phrase typing.
>
> So can tuxtype actually support this, and if so, how?

I don't know.  I do know that our "Indic Team", led by Mobin Mohan,
got tuxtype working for several Indic languages last year and the year
before.  In particular, the Malayalam theme seemed to be very
complete.  However, I don't have any personal experience with how the
keyboard input worked.  Hopefully Mobin, Sreyas, and company are still
following this list and could comment.

Tuxtype looks at each SDL_Event to see if it is a keypress, and if it
is a keypress it inspects the "unicode" field to see what character is
encoded.