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
There are over 250 languages indigenous to Europe, and most 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. The three larges ...
. 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 application programming interfaces (APIs), along with comm ...
-style
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...
s including
Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
and
BSD
The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, beginni ...
. 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 and
m17nbr>
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++ 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; 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+,
Qt and Clutter 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.
See also
*
Input method
*
IBus
The principal factors that characterize beer are bitterness, the variety of flavours present in the beverage and their intensity, ethanol, alcohol content, and colour. Standards for those characteristics allow a more objective and uniform determ ...
*
List of input methods for UNIX platforms
*
uim
References
External links
m17n Multilingualization*
{{Input Method
Freedesktop.org
Input methods
Free software programmed in C++