Perception IME and Locale Integration...

Well the initial plan for Perception IME is to add a "perception.library" into LIBS:

However to setup and present this library to the system ...

nihongo.language would be setup and loaded by locale.library as part of Iprefs
setup of system-wide settings

Either the system loading "nihongo.language" or an alternative language library
which recognises and uses Perception.Library from LIBS:

or the launch of an IME Commodity (Perception itself will provide this)
which will show the graphical parts of the IME system.

Beyond the Commodity and main library, language drivers will have the option of adding
language modes to the keyboard input stream.

One example of this will be the Japanese "Nihongo.Language" driver for locale.library
presenting Japanese sorting (this IS radically different from English)
along with being multi-modal (Direct , Hiragana , Katakana , Kanji & DblWide modes)

The "Direct" mode will produce English (UK or US standard),
The "Hiragana" mode will present 50 basic Japanese Hiragana everyday pictographs,
While "Katakana" mode presents the 50 pictographs for Imported words.

The "Kanji" mode however is the most complicated in needing a custom tree of lists
with expanded short search key mechanism...

Typing the string "Kanji" has Hiragana & Katakana forms along with an additional
14 Pictographic combinations to select meanings.

Double-pressing "space" after typing a word will trigger the display of a popup menu,
with any particular options centered on the current cursor location.

This does however create a question as to input encodings...
so I have already decided to use UTF8 at least for within Perception itself.

I have not decided beyond supporting at least UTF8 encoding,
possibly adding a text encoding translation tool amongst other options

I have deliberately only decided to complete the keyboard and initial UI access to options
I will not force anyone to have any particular set of tools beyond the basic modal
typing options for an IME so that at least the basic materials are functionally
complete without flaws.

anything further than that I will be adding based on user requests and support

I will not use Perception IME to push any changes to the existing Amiga OS 3.x or 4.x design

[edit] 2012-02-04 4:34am,
I've started adding the Perception IME material to the OpenAmiga Subversion repository
within the "Language Drivers" project there...

so everyone who wants access to the developer materials will be able to access it there
as the primary repository ( I will also be actively releasing materials for testing )
[/edit]