= What's uim? =

Uim is a multilingual input method library, whose goal is to be a flexible development platform and useful user environment for input methods of all languages. 


== Features of uim ==

There are some input method frameworks in the world.  What is the feature of uim and how it is different from other input method frameworks?

=== Portable ===

uim works in many environments, including of course general desktop systems such as GNOME or KDE. It also supports Linux Zaurus, Mac OS X.

||uim on Linux Zaurus||||uim on MacOS X||
||http://zaurus-ja.sourceforge.jp/images/imkit/imkit-0.4.0-pre6-candidates.png||||[http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwiki.yatsu.info%2FMacUIM%2F&langpair=ja%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools Google Translation of its wiki (JA->EN), no screenshot available]||


=== Just a library ===

Many input method frameworks such as XIM are implemented as client/server systems. But uim is a library, not a server.

Most users don't need an input method system at all or only need simple, table-based converters.  Such users don't require or are unwilling to install a complex input method system, so we want to keep uim simple.

== What applications can I use with uim? ==

	* All X applications. (You can use them with [UIM_XIM uim-xim].)
	* Gtk+ applications such as gedit. There are two way to use uim. Through uim gtk+-immodule directly, or through xim immodule. We recommend using uim through gtk+ immodule directly.
	* All Qt applications. There are two ways to use uim, through XIM or Qt-immodule. If you want to uim with Qt-immodule, you need to use [http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fimmodule_2dqt a patch] now.
	* All console applications. (You can use them with [UIM_FEP uim-fep].)
	* Emacs (You can use it with [UIM_EL uim-el]).

== What Languages and Input modules can I use with uim? ==

	* Chinese
		* New Pinyin (Simplified)
		* Pinyin (Unicode)
		* Pinyin (Traditional)
		* Chewing (Traditional)(http://uim.googlecode.com/svn/uim-chewing-trunk/)
	* Japanese
		* [http://sourceforge.jp/projects/anthy/ Anthy]
		* [http://sourceforge.jp/projects/shinji Mana]
		* [http://taiyaki.org/prime/ PRIME]
		* SKK
		* T-Code
		* TUT-Code
	* Korean
		* Byeoru
		* Hangul (2-beol)
		* Hangul (3-beol)
		* Hangul (Romaja)

And you can input many languages by using uim-m17nlib, see (http://www.m17n.org/m17n-lib-en/)

== Why is uim written in C? ==

We can ensure a stable ABI, which is crucial to uim since it's a basal library.
Particularly, maintaining an ABI in C++ is sometimes difficult.

== Why does uim have an embedded scheme interpreter? ==

Because C is too primitive to work with directly. Scheme lets us be more productive.