Changes/Ibus-typing-booster multilingual support

Ibus-typing-booster_multilingual_support

Summary

Traditionally user need to switch IME for typing another language. With this feature users can configure multiple language in single IBus typing booster IME and use it without changing input methods.

Owner

• Name: Mike Fabian, Pravin Satpute
• Email: mfabian AT redhat DOT com, pravins At fedoraproject DOT org
• Release notes owner:

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 25
• Last updated: 2016-09-30
• Tracker bug: #1357390

Detailed Description

Ibus-typing-booster has recently been improved to use several languages at once in a single engine, see the documentation for multilingual input .

Also, multilingual emoji predictions have been added very recently (ibus-typing-booster >= 1.5.0), see the documentation for emoji-predictions' .

Although that already works, it is not obvious how to set it up, the graphical setup tool currently only supports the special case of using British English in addition to the main language of the current engine.

For other combinations of languages and/or transliteration methods one has to use dconf on the command line to set it up. That is quite inconvenient. Therefore, this proposal suggests to change the setup tool to make multilingual setup easy.

Benefit to Fedora

Multilingual support in ibus-typing-booster is very useful for users who regularly type in different languages, it saves switching input engines all the time because it detects the language automatically based on user input.

Scope

• Proposal owners:
  • Improve the ibus-typing-booster setup tool to make multilingual setup easy.

• Other developers: N/A

• Release engineering: N/A
  • List of deliverables: N/A

• Policies and guidelines: N/A

• Trademark approval: N/A

Upgrade/compatibility impact

The UI of the setup tool will change a lot. Maybe, all current engines of ibus-typing-booster will be merged into one multilingual engine, I am not yet sure about that. If all engines are merged in to a single engine, it may not be possible to merge all setup done for a single language version of an older version of ibus-typing-booster may into the new setup and some setup may need to be done again.

How To Test

1. Log into GNOME desktop and add an ibus-typing-booster engine in the control center
2. Or, on non-GNOME desktops, run the "ibus-setup" utility and enable an ibus-typing-booster engine.
3. Use the setup tool of the ibus-typing-booster engine to enable more than one language.
4. Type text in the desired languages and check whether there are useful predictions for all configured languages.
5. Install hunspell-<langcode> for better prediction and remove warning from suggestion table.
6. $ibus restart

User Experience

Easy typing in several languages at once without switching input engines.

Dependencies

N/A

Contingency Plan

• Contingency mechanism: Drop the feature in Fedora 25 and postpone it to Fedora 26
• Contingency deadline: Probably Fedora 25 Alpha freeze
• Blocks release? No
• Blocks product? No

Documentation

• Current ibus-typing-booster documentation for multilingual input
• Current ibus-typing-booster documentation for emoji predictions