[icu-design] ICU4J API proposal: IMEUtility::suggest(...)

[McKaot <mc...@go...>]

Dear ICU team and users,

In order to provide an interactive IME support (based on a concrete
transliteration), I would like to propose the following ICU4J API for
the next ICU release:

public final class IMEUtility
{
    /**
     * Make a suggestion for a given input context which keys are
possible to complete the input

     * @param transliterator - a concrete transliterator, that is used
to transform the user input
     * @param text - the input context
     * @param index -  the start and limit of the text, the position
of the cursor, and the start and limit of transliteration
     *
     * @return a character set containing possible characters for the
specified input context. It can be an empty.
     *
     * @draft ICU 4.6
     */
    public static UnicodeSet suggest(Transliterator transliterator,
Replaceable text, Transliterator.Position index).
}


With such an API it would be possible to implement an interactive IME
- independent from a concrete user interface framework (AWT/Swing,
SWT, whatsoever).
This would simplify the input of characters that cannot be typed in
streight forward manner, e.g. characters combined with diacritical
signs.
This way a non-latin input is also facilitated; for example, for the
pinyin syllable 'hong' there are quite some chinese glyphs.
The benefit ot such a method would be to show them BEFORE the user has
completed the input -
something like this here: http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/ime.html

An adaptation for any ui framework can, of course not be up to ICU.

Best regards
Andrew


PS: I can imagine, that this is an interesting feature ICU4C, too.