SCIM - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Smart Common Input Method platform (SCIM) is an input method

Input method

An input method is an operating system component or program that allows any data, such as keyboard strokes or mouse movements, to be received as input. In this way users can enter characters and symbols not found on their input devices...

(IM) platform containing support for more than thirty languages (CJK

CJK

CJK is a collective term for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which is used in the field of software and communications internationalization.The term CJKV means CJK plus Vietnamese, which constitute the main East Asian languages.- Characteristics :...

and many European languages) for POSIX

POSIX

POSIX , an acronym for "Portable Operating System Interface", is a family of standards specified by the IEEE for maintaining compatibility between operating systems...

-style operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

s including Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

and BSD.

It uses a clear architecture and provides a simple and powerful programming interface, which is meant to reduce the time required for developing individual IMs.

Goals

The main goals of the SCIM project include:

To act as a unified frontend for current available input method libraries. Bindings
Language binding
In computing, a binding from a programming language to a library or OS service is an API providing that service in the language.Many software libraries are written in systems programming languages such as C or C++...

to uim
Uim
uim is a multilingual input method framework. Applications can use it through so-called bridges.- Supported applications :...

and m17n http://www.m17n.org/ library are available (as of August 2007).
To act as a language engine of IIIMF (an input method framework).
To support as many input method protocols/interfaces as existing and in common use.
To support multiple operating systems. (Currently, only POSIX-style operating systems are available.)

Architecture

SCIM is written in the C++

C++

C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...

language. It abstracts the input method interface to several classes

Class (computer science)

In object-oriented programming, a class is a construct that is used as a blueprint to create instances of itself – referred to as class instances, class objects, instance objects or simply objects. A class defines constituent members which enable these class instances to have state and behavior...

and attempts to simplify the classes and make them more independent from each other. With the simpler and more independent interfaces, developers can write their own input methods in fewer lines of code.

SCIM is a modularized IM platform, and as such, components can be implemented as dynamically loadable modules, thus can be loaded during runtime at will. For example, input methods written for SCIM could be IMEngine modules, and users can use such IMEngine modules combined with different interface modules (FrontEnd) in different environments without rewrite or recompile of the IMEngine modules, reducing the compile time or development time of the project.

SCIM is a high level library, similar to XIM

X Input Method

X Input Method was the original input method framework for the X Window System. It predates SCIM, uim and IIIMF. The specification is copyrighted 1993,1994....

or IIIMF; however, SCIM claims to be simpler than either of those IM platforms. SCIM also claims that it can be used alongside XIM or IIIMF. SCIM can also be used to extend the input method interface of existing application toolkits, such as GTK+2

GTK+

GTK+ is a cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU LGPL, allowing both free and proprietary software to use it. It is one of the most popular toolkits for the X Window System, along with Qt.The name GTK+ originates from GTK;...

and Qt

Qt (toolkit)

Qt is a cross-platform application framework that is widely used for developing application software with a graphical user interface , and also used for developing non-GUI programs such as command-line tools and consoles for servers...

via IMmodules.

Related projects

SKIM is a separate project aimed at integrating SCIM more tightly into the K Desktop Environment

KDE

KDE is an international free software community producing an integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X systems...

, by providing a GUI panel (named scim-panel-kde as an alternative to scim-panel-gtk), a KConfig config module and setup dialogs for itself and the SCIM module libscim. It also has its own plugin system which supports on-demand loadable actions.

t-latn-pre and t-latn-post are two input methods that provide an easy way for composing accented characters, either by preceding regular characters with diacritic marks (in the case of t-latn-pre), or by adding the marks subsequently (in the case of t-latn-post). Their main advantage is the large number of composed characters from different languages that can be entered this way, rendering it unnecessary to install, for example, separate keyboard layouts. These input methods are available for SCIM through the M17n library.

Goals

Architecture

Related projects

See also