Support a Traditional Chinese input method

[Pat McGowan]

Our pinyin plugin only provides support for Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese is often requested.
In Taiwan especially many people use Zhuyin and it is taught in elementary schools.

Ubuntu has a Chewing implementation on the desktop, presumably an approach similar to the pinyin plugin can be developed.

[Michael Sheldon (michael-sheldon)]

libpinyin (which we currently use for pinyin input) appears to have support for chewing style input, does anyone know how this compares to libchewing or libzhuyin? It'd probably be simpler to use libpinyin as we already make use of it for simplified Chinese input, but only if its chewing performance is on a par with the dedicated libraries on offer.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[ChangZhuo Chen (陳昌倬) (czchen)]

Disclose first:
- I am libchewing developer
- I am Debian Developer in pkg-ime team which maintains libchewing, libpinyin, libzhuyin.

In short, please use libchewing or libzhuyin for Traditional Chinese user.

Different between Simplified and Traditional Chinese is not only about the word, but also about the phrase. For example, mouse is called "鼠標" in Simplified Chinese, and "滑鼠" in Traditional Chinese. The words I used here are all Traditional Chinese variant, but the phrases here are from different variant. So if I see "鼠標" in an article, , even when the word itself is Traditional Chinese, I will say it uses Simplified Chinese or it is translated badly from Simplified Chinese to Traditional Chinese. In fact, there is a tool, called opencc, to do the conversion between different Chinese variants, and you can see it has a big dictionary to do phrase mapping [0].

For an intelligent Chinese input method based on pronounce, it is all about phrase database and to predict what user really want via prediction algorithm and phrase database. If libpinyin does not have separate phrase database for Traditional Chinese, it cannot compare to libchewing, libzhuyin who has Traditional Chinese phrase database for Traditional Chinese user.

[0] https://github.com/BYVoid/OpenCC/tree/master/data/dictionary

[[e-mail] (extraymond)]

Hi, is there any updates?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package ubuntu-keyboard - 0.99.trunk.phablet2+16.04.20160506-0ubuntu1

---------------
ubuntu-keyboard (0.99.trunk.phablet2+16.04.20160506-0ubuntu1) xenial; urgency=medium

  * Update dependency on hunspell-sv (LP: #1579115)

 -- Michael Sheldon <email address hidden> Fri, 06 May 2016 15:42:21 +0000