Creating a Virtual Keyboard in Simplified Chinese

Question

Hi,

I'm developing an application which I have successfully derived the Virtual Keyboard to support other languages as per the examples. However I'm a bit stuck on how to do so with a Chinese Layout. Since I'm running on top of linux I'm thinking of developing a device driver using something like libpinyin and then feeding back to the UI as the keystrokes are pressed. Is there any example or any other way that has already been developed, or would you recommend a different approach? I wanted to ask in this forum in case I can get some feedback that would point me in the right direction.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Hello Ialden,

developing of input machines for languages like Chinese is a complex task we have not focused up to now. Unfortunately we have no example and no experience with libpinyin. What we provide is the template of a Virtual Keyboard GUI component. Since each customer has very different expectations concerning the look&feel of such GUI component, the templates are kept as generic as possible and they are intended to be adapted/enhanced by the customer. I admit, I have never seen a Chinese Virtual Keyboard in work so I it is difficult to give you concrete tips how to achive this task. From UI point of view I don't expect any limitations. The difficulty will be to implement/integrate the state machine needed to control and process the user inputs. Assuming such state machine is implemented in the libpinyin, you can integrate it with EmWi. Concrete you can call functions of libpinyin from EmWi and vice versa. Please see the section Integrating with the device.

Does it help you anyway?

Best regards

Paul Banach

Comments

Thanks for your answer. Yes, I was thinking along those lines, it may also be possible to do this in EmWi but its a fair amount of work to port the logic as you say, perhaps in the future we may find a common repository with reusable components so that any generic components can be shared with the community.

Answer 2

Hi,

we must also integrate the Chinese Keyboard.

We are beginners in EW, so i'm not very experienced in fonts and how to configurate them.

EW creates Bitmaps from the glyphes specified in the FontRange. Is it possible to generate the glyphs on runtime instead? Asian languages have tousands of characters and when every character, which can be typed in, is stored as a Bitmap, it might be a huge amount of memory.

 

@ ialden: how did you deal with that problem?

 

Best regards, Jonas