This bug report is apropos to this[1] emacs.devel thread. The basic idea is that in the Emacs sources there's a file containing a mapping between pinyin -- the most common Chinese romanization system -- and Chinese characters themselves. The mapping lives in leim/MISC-DIC/pinyin.map, and is converted into a quail input method by the `py-converter' function in titdic-cnv.el, which is part of the "make" process. I want this mapping to be available to elisp code in general, because it's useful for all kinds of other language utilities (searching Chinese characters using ascii letters, etc). pinyin.map is a plain text file, each line consisting of a romanized syllable, a TAB, and a string of the possible corresponding Chinese characters. `titdic-convert' parses this and feeds it to `quail-define-rules'. My first thought was to add an intermediate step, where `titdic-convert' first composes an alist, then feeds that alist to `quail-define-rules', which would also allow us access to the alist. The more I looked at it, the more hacky and awkward that approached seemed, and it's not like it would save any memory: you still end up with the data both in a quail method, and in a separate alist. So this proposed patch simply parses the same file in the same way, but in a different location. I've put it in china-util.el, but chinese.el would also be a reasonable spot. Both those files are concerned with encoding, but at least "china-util" gives the impression that it could be a grab-bag. I'm not sure this use of `source-directory' is particularly robust, but I don't know how else to handle it. Hope this will be considered! Eric [1]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2019-01/msg00306.html
0001-New-constant-chinese-pinyin-character-map.patch
Description: Text Data
--- End Message ---