Re: Feature needed

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

James Cloos writes:

 > Sorry.  I thought that it went w/o saying that I was referring to quail.
 > And, as I found out trying to input 日本語 yesterday, even then only a
[...]
 > As for why, Miles and Daniel hit the nail on the head; to know how to
 > input it in the future.

For Japanese, the answer is EDICT and edict.el.  All popular methods
for Japanese are phonetic, and the phonetics are extremely regular, so
an ordinary dictionary does the trick and edict.el will pick up the
character from the Emacs buffer.

Ditto Korean Hangul (without need for even a dictionary for the
syllabary, although Hanja might be an issue if there is no equivalent
to EDICT for Korean).

Dunno about Chinese, where many methods seem to be quite arbitrary
mappings.  I would suppose to the extent that these are not
context-sensitive, reverse-indexing on the character in the quail
table would work.

For small-repertoire input methods like latin-1-prefix, reverse
indexing should work.

Japanese (and similarly for phonetic input of Chinese and Korean
Hanja) is probably hardest since context (neighboring characters) is
used to drastically prune the list presented to the user.  But I don't
understand why the reverse indexing method for single characters
doesn't already work, even for Japanese, to be honest.