The Chewing (酷音) input method is an intelligent

Zhuyin Bopomofo (), or Mandarin Phonetic Symbols, also named Zhuyin (), is a Chinese transliteration system for Mandarin Chinese and other related languages and dialects. More commonly used in Taiwanese Mandarin, it may also be used to transcribe ...

input method An input method (or input method editor, commonly abbreviated IME) is an operating system component or program that enables users to generate characters not natively available on their input devices by using sequences of characters (or mouse o ...

. It is one of the most popular input methods among Traditional Chinese Unix users. Chewing was a project established by Lu-Chuan Kung (龔律全) and Jeremy Kang-Pen Chen (陳康本), sponsored by Tsan-sheng Hsu (徐讚昇) from Academia Sinica. Their research result (the program) was published under the

GPL The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...

. The Chewing core team extended their work and actively maintains the project.

Motivation

Chewing was inspired by other proprietary intelligent Zhuyin input methods under Microsoft Windows, namely, Wang-Xin (忘形) by Eten, Microsoft New Zhuyin (微軟新注音), and Nature Zhuyin (自然注音). Since Zhuyin-based input methods are the most popular among computer users who read and write Traditional Chinese, an intelligent Zhuyin method is a necessity for Unix-like systems in order to attract more users. There was a similar input method, bimsphone (詞音), which was bundled in XCIN. However, it does not have a convenient

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

for further development. The original chewing (as developed by Kung and Chen) is no longer maintained, only works with XIM, and doesn't have a generic API for input frameworks. Jim Huang, et al. formed the Chewing core team and extended Gong and Chen's work. Thus the chewing core team renamed the project as "new" chewing (新酷音) to differentiate their work from the original. Nevertheless, the English name has remained "chewing".

Goals

* Split logic and view. * Support multiple operating systems, and input framework. * Provide a universal API for input framework and further development.

Supported Systems

Chewing has been adopted by various input frameworks in Unix-like systems. On these systems, the chewing package is usually split into two parts: ''libchewing'', which handles the actual character selection logic; and ''input framework interface'' for display and preference setting. For examples: * ibus-chewing for

IBus When drinking beer, there are many factors to be considered. Principal among them are bitterness, the variety of flavours present in the beverage and their intensity, alcohol content, and colour. Standards for those characteristics allow a more o ...

. * fcitx-chewing for

Fcitx Fcitx (, ) is an input method framework with extension support for the X Window System that supports multiple input method engines including Pinyin transcription, table-based input methods (e.g. Wubi method), fcitx-chewing for Traditional Chinese ...

* iiimf-chewing for IIIMF. * scim-chewing for SCIM. * uim-chewing for

uim uim (short for "universal input method") is a multilingual input method framework. Applications can use it through so-called ''bridges''. Supported applications uim supports the X Window System legacy XIM (short for X Input Method) through ...

.uim has a chewing module available separately.
/ref> There are also chewing input method for Windows (win32-chewing) and Mac OS (SpaceChewing via OpenVanilla).

References

{{reflist Han character input