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geekhack Community => Keyboards => Topic started by: HighKey on Sat, 30 May 2020, 09:36:01
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I found a forum thread of someone describing a method of text input I am not familiar with. It is very often used with Japanese language, as the words are not composed of single letters but rather, constructed. The way it work is that it receives letters and merges them to compose a symbol. With more letters added entirely different symbols are composed.
From what I can imagine this is not done by the keyboard itself but I don't know how it works. It seems that this type of construction also exist for other languages. For example, a Space is replaced by a Question Mark when Shift is tapped, and replaced again, by Ellipsis, if tapped once more.
I think it is the same mechanism. Is it the same? How is this method called? Is this something specific to a keyboard layout or OS?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_method
http://xahlee.info/kbd/Japan_input_method.html
http://xahlee.info/kbd/chinese_input_methods.html
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It’s rather simple for Japanese. There are three alphabets, two phonetic (hiragana used for Japanese text, katakana for foreign transliteration) and one which is Chinese (kanji). When typing, you spell out the two-letter phonetic character you want and after pressing a button, usually space, it will parse out the input. Kanji also must be spelled out, though modern predictive technology allows you to input only the first letter or two in many cases. Before an input is confirmed, a box on the side indicates the default output which can be changed by pressing a different number (for less likely but possible results). Unfortunately, this means that Japanese keyboards require dedicated buttons to switch between script as well as to and from Roman letters.
It’s a similar case for Chinese, though there are more specialized systems where the characters are ‘constructed’ from their components.