The Smart Common Input Method (SCIM) is a platform for inputting more than thirty languages on computers, including Chinese-Japanese-Korean style character languages ( CJK), and many

European languages Most languages of Europe belong to the Indo-European language family. Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language. Within Indo-European, the three largest phyla are Rom ...

. It is used for

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming interf ...

-style

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

s including

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

and

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...

. Its purposes are to provide a simple and powerful common interface for users from any country, and to provide a clear architecture for programming, so as to reduce time required to develop individual input methods.

Goals

The main goals of the SCIM project include: * To act as a unified frontend for current available input method libraries. Bindings to

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 ...

and

m17n Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingualism, monolingual speakers in the World population, world's pop ...

br>
library are available (as of August 2007). * To act as a language engine of IIIMF (an input method framework). * To support as many input method protocols/interfaces as existing and in common use. * To support multiple operating systems. (Currently, only POSIX-style operating systems are available.)

Architecture

SCIM was originally written in the

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

language but has moved to pure C since 1.4.14. It abstracts the input method interface to several classes and attempts to simplify the classes and make them more independent from each other. With the simpler and more independent interfaces, developers can write their own input methods in fewer lines of code. SCIM is a ''modularized'' IM platform, and as such, components can be implemented as dynamically loadable modules, thus can be loaded during runtime at will. For example, input methods written for SCIM could be IMEngine modules, and users can use such IMEngine modules combined with different interface modules (FrontEnd) in different environments without rewrite or recompile of the IMEngine modules, reducing the compile time or development time of the project. SCIM is a high-level library, similar to XIM or

IIIMF IIIMF (Internet/Intranet Input Method Framework) is the default input method framework for Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese and Korean on old Fedora Linux systems. Since Fedora Core 5, '' SCIM'' has been selected as the default input ...

; however, SCIM claims to be simpler than either of those IM platforms. SCIM also claims that it can be used alongside XIM or IIIMF. SCIM can also be used to extend the input method interface of existing application toolkits, such as

GTK+ GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and proprie ...

, Qt and

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via IMmodules.

Related projects

SKIM is a separate project aimed at integrating SCIM more tightly into the K Desktop Environment, by providing a GUI panel (named ''scim-panel-kde'' as an alternative to ''scim-panel-gtk''), a KConfig config module and setup dialogs for itself and the SCIM module libscim. It also has its own plugin system which supports on-demand loadable actions. t-latn-pre and t-latn-post are two input methods that provide an easy way for composing accented characters, either by preceding regular characters with diacritic marks (in the case of t-latn-pre), or by adding the marks subsequently (in the case of t-latn-post). Their main advantage is the large number of composed characters from different languages that can be entered this way, rendering it unnecessary to install, for example, separate keyboard layouts.An overview of the available characters can be found at the M17n library website: These input methods are available for SCIM through the M17n library.

References

External links

m17n Multilingualization
* {{Input Method Freedesktop.org Input methods Free software programmed in C++

Goals

Architecture

Related projects

See also

References

External links