The most recent release of WPF Studio, 2009.2 build 515, added complete IME editing support to the SyntaxEditor control. This has been a highly requested feature item so we’re pleased to introduce it.
What is IME?
The input method editor (IME) is a Window feature that allows users to enter characters and symbols not found on their input device. For instance, it allows Western keyboards to enter Chinese, Japanese, etc. characters.
Unfortunately WPF’s support of IME is spotty, and it only is supported in TextBoxBase controls. Since SyntaxEditor doesn’t inherit TextBoxBase (we need to track text on our own), the only way to add it was via Windows API calls. Thus while the IME input features will now work by default in Windows apps, they will not work in XBAPs because of security.
IME in action
Here’s a sample of how it works. We have started up our demo application and in the Windows language bar, enabled Japanese Hiragana input.
At the cursor we’ll type the A key on our Western keyboard.
A small popup appears that “looks” like it’s inline with the code editor. A Japanese glyph is displayed. If we accept the glyph we can press Enter to insert it. We could type other characters to make different glyphs or enter a number of glyphs at one time.
To end this demo, we have pressed Enter and the glyph has been inserted into our code editor.
Summary
Now that SyntaxEditor has full support for IME and bi-di text, it is an ideal editor control for use in any global application.