Purpose: to provide a place where developers discuss the issues, and solutions, to providing support for input method editors across various platforms - specifically in relationship to Tcl (and related extension) support. ---- It is my understanding that an input method editor is a piece of software designed to assist one in inputting characters that do not appear on their keyboard and are nontrivial to input. For instance, while many keyboards... allow the use of meta-character to get umlauts, acute e's, etc. kanji, chinese, korean, arabic, etc. have thousands of special characters. Something more than meta-shift-control-a,b,c is needed Windows and MacOS have OS specific kits that one can install to enable ease of input. Under X11, there are several apps for providing assistance in getting the characters input. The fact that each platform does things differently means that to provide support for the input methods is very complex for a language. Right now, work is being done within Tcl 8.4a2 to provide better support for Microsoft's IMEs. I don't know whether anyone is doing any work on other platforms (MacOS, Unix). ---- See also [i18n - Writing for the world], [Unicode and UTF-8], and [Common Questions about Tcl/Tk and Japanese language support], [XIM]. Some net resources I've had recommended include http://java.sun.com/products/jdk/1.2/docs/guide/intl/spec.html and http://www.mozilla.org/projects/intl/input-method-spec.html ---- Up through Tk 8.5a1, developers working with [LV] have found that they have not been able to get the built in Tk input method support to work on SPARC Solaris machines. However, with the patch at [http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=905830&group_id=12997&atid=112997], [LV] is being told that things appear to now work. ---- [Category Human Language]