https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=834971
--- Comment #3 from Caius Chance me@kaio.net --- I am a Fedora user from HK but not in HK. Counting my brother who uses Fedora in his workplace as server, it won't be just you. :)
* Introduction *
This is not the problem only of IBus on Fedora, but I think is IBus itself. There are a few things I need to mention separately about this negative user experiences to HK / Traditional Chinese users, that I hope could be documented permanently somewhere on the Internet:
1. Default value. 2. User interface. 3. Filter. 4. Cangjie & Quick. 5. Design of logic.
* Default Value *
Cangjie & Quick are mostly living in ibus-table on Fedora. Since the main developers of ibus and ibus-table are from Simplified Chinese background, the default values are set for Simplified Chinese users they expected to behave. This made the filters of Cangjie and Quick "Simplified Chinese only". When there are no candidate characters will come up that users expected, users with novice level of computing knowledge probably recognized that as a broken input method software.
I remembered some patches have been done by acevery (dev of ibus-table) and others, to check up the system locale when the engine starts for a default value of "Traditional Chinese only" filter. Sadly, this fix did not resolve the problem on my box, which I am using English locale + UI with Cangjie input method. And I think at the end of the day my use case was ignored as "not common scenario".
* User Interface *
Okay, I can confidently say - no one from Hong Kong will select Chinese (Hong Kong) on regional settings during installation. The reason of this partly because there had been no substantial Cantonese localization happened in Fedora, past experience on Windows where no Chinese input methods were provided in such locale, and other problems on fonts/font-config/input methods on IBus, etc. This forced most of users who preferred Traditional Chinese UI to pick zh_TW as locale, no matter they are from HK / TW / Chinese communities around the world. This is somehow should not let it be.
The next thing is the broken UI of IBus on Gnome 3. The toolbar / properties bar / floating bar was gone in Gnome 3. And right click on the IBus tray icon (whatever it is in "zh" or a little keyboard) when Cangjie / Quick is the active input method, the setting items are all blank. This should be some color defaults when the default menu backgroud colors were light in Gnome 2. Having this gives inconvenience to "better than beginners" users to have filter value be changed from "simplified" to "traditional" or anything. I once have read a consumer computing magazine / web site published in HK, the author commented Fedora as "Linux which is not capable to support Chinese users". I think the reputation can get worse along time.
* Filter * My first Fedora for daily purpose was Fedora Core 5. Its default input method engine / framework was SCIM. In SCIM, it demonstrated the true purposes of Chinese filter (on Cangjie / Quick / anything) - users can input in either Traditional or Simplified Chinese key combinations, and able to output the characters of in each other's standards. This aim the traditional Chinese user who needs to communicate with simplified Chinese user who cannot read the characters of each other, and vice versa. The ibus-table has not implemented that before SCIM was replaced by IBus. FYI, instant messaging software aliwangwang / taobaowangwang developed by alibaba.com for e-business have this function built in, when I was using that years ago.
I understand about the filter Mathieu mentioned and IBus had been using - the specific candidates of the tables are not listed for commit. As Mathieu explained about the design of the Cangjie and Quick, a given key combination of Cangjie should yield 1 Chinese character only, despite of acceptable duplicate %. A key combination of a traditional Chinese should get only tradition Chinese character, except when the table maker put a mapping of traditional Chinese key combination with a simplified Chinese character, and vice versa. FYI, many input method software adopted this behavior, such as "Cangjie Friends" on Windows (made by developers from Malaysia) and KeyKey / Kimo Input on OS X developed by Yahoo!. They put that as a switch in preferences - "Show only big-5 characters", where big-5 is a charset mostly cover traditional Chinese characters even fewer than Unicode defined.
There should be an "agreed" design which resulted the filter used by IBus now. I personally am not against this, but I guess the workload on table maintenance will be heavy. I still wish the filter in SCIM was implemented than the way of IBus has taken. I am not sure how to improve this yet.
* Cangjie & Quick *
About Cangjie, it is originally a design for all Chinese characters by breaking them down into key combinations in regard if it is traditional or simplified. Although during the simplification some strokes were made "not too complying" to the Cangjie design, I have seen so many input method engine / table came up some key mapping of character parts. Cangjie is not so appropriate for daily use of simplified characters, because relatively less strokes on simplified Chinese increased the duplication of candidates results. That's why Smart Pinyin may have higher productivity/typing-speed than Cangjie for simplified characters. Hope Cangjie on Fedora can focus on traditional Chinese first.
About Quick, you take first and last key from key combinations of a character. All quick Quick typists memorized the positions of candidates for frequent characters. The influence of Microsoft Windows again - users who uses Quick will complain "order of candidates and number of candidates on each page, are different from the orders on Windows", until they see the candidates on same place as they are on Windows. AFAIK I disabled the dynamic order on Quick, but changing the default number of candidates on each candidate-window page was not changed.
* Design of Logic *
The ibus-table has so may things hard-coded. It also consists of so many concepts suitable only for China users, like goucima (keys of character combination), pinyin value. The punctuation on ibus-table was hard-coded and was no so good, considering there are some more foreign tables such as Cyrillic, Latin, Thai, Vietnamese that may not using Chinese punctuation symbols.
I received comments from people who tried ibus and ibus-table, that having sqlite and python slowed down the speed too much. I heard Ding Yi Chen has rewritten that into C but seems it has not been used but the original ibus-table in Python is still the default.
I do believe if no improvements significantly on ibus-table, it won't help the Fedora / Linux promotions in HK. For Taiwan people they just change to gcin/hime after installation, and for China people I heard fcitx is much more welcomed by them with some people did switch to fcitx because it is better to them.
* Conclusion *
I have the best user experience on SCIM (besides re-login was required when it crashed): accurate inputting, filter worked, informative & nice toolbar icons, responsive. If there is a goal of making an input method framework better than SCIM, changes are required on not just ibus-table but ibus from the bottom. There are not enough contributors / someone with resources to do that I personally observed.