.cin Input Managers

Starting from iKeyEx 0.1-99d, .cin input managers are supported natively. The .cin format allows table-based IME, like Cangjie (倉頡), Pinyin (拼音) etc to be created.

You can find many .cin files of common IME here: http://cle.linux.org.tw/trac/wiki/GcinTables.

Directory layout

  /Library/iKeyEx/InputManagers/
    <IMEName>.ime/
      Info.plist
      <???>.cin

Info.plist

There should be two entries,

1. UIKeyboardInputManagerClass should be set to the filename of the .cin file,
2. IKXLanguage should be set to the language of the IME. Currently, it can only be zh-Hant (Traditional Chinese) or zh-Hans (Simplified Chinese). If this key is absent, zh-Hant is the default.

.cin File Format

The general format is described in http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac/pages/input_methods.html.

For iKeyEx, only the %keyname and %chardef sections required. All other info are ignored. The %keyname section is only used to determine what characters can participate in the IME.

The input string must be in lowercase and consists of 9 or less characters (excess characters will be ignored.) There are no restriction on the corresponding output string, but it would be the best if it can fit within 2 UTF-16 code points (the .cin file itself must still be UTF-8, however).

Phrase and character tables

Phrase and characters tables are used to sort characters and display associated words in a candidate list. The tables can be downloaded from the iKeyEx Chinese Support package, but you can create one on your own.

The phrase tables should be stored in /Library/iKeyEx/Phrase/<Language>/ and encoded in UTF-8. The general format is

<Phrase>\n
<Phrase>\n
...

The higher the character, the more frequent it appears.

Characters tables

Characters table is used to calculate ordering in a candidate list. It must have an extension of .chrs.

Each entry of a characters table should occupy no more than 2 UTF-16 code-points (The file itself should still be encoded in UTF-8, as above). The number of entry must be less than 2.1 billion (2³¹).

The source of the character tables in iKeyEx Chinese Support package are

• Traditional Chinese: http://technology.chtsai.org/charfreq/ (?)
• Simplified Chinese: http://readmandarin.com/resultsutf8.txt (from readmandarin.com)

Phrase tables

Phrases (a.k.a. Associated Words 聯想 / 相關字詞) can be used to complete a character into a word. In the most common scenario, after you have accepted a character candidate (say, 義), a list of completions (e.g. 大利, 工, 務, 正辭嚴, etc.) will be shown to quickly finish a word.

A phrase table must have an extension of .phrs.

The source of the iKeyEx Chinese Support table are obtained from:

• Traditional Chinese: 新酷音詞庫 (tsi.src from libchewing. LGPL.)
• Simplified Chinese: 智能拼音词库 (phrase_lib.txt from scim-pinyin, with words having frequency = 0 filtered out. GPL.)