209640 - Type-ahead find does not work in conjunction with a Japanese IME

Status: VERIFIED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Internationalization, enhancement)

Description

[s.marshall]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030521
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030521

The type-ahead find feature does not appear to work in Japanese (or, presumably,
other languages that have an IME which requires 'composing' input before it is
entered).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to the URL above (http://www.bk1.co.jp/)
2. Focus the main browser window
3. Make sure your computer is in Japanese input mode, set to hiragana
4. Type / to initiate type-ahead find
5. Type 'hajime'

Actual Results:  
Nothing happened. If, however, you press Enter, then it does perform 'type-ahead
find', selecting the first link in the left-hand nav bar (the character selected
is a mid-dot, not ha, ji, or me.)



Expected Results:  
The first link in the top bar, which has hiragana 'hajimete', should have been
selected.

Type-ahead find on this page works correctly for Roman characters e.g. search
for 'book'. 

The problem appears to be threefold:

1. The language requires a 'composition display' where you type in characters
before submitting them to the application by pressing Enter [for example, see
what happens if you type 'hajime' into the URL bar, which works correctly], but
such a window is not visible when using typeahead find.

2. Although the composition window is not visible, you still have to press Enter
to submit the typed characters.

3. When you do submit the typed characters, the search for them does not work.



I think the best way would be to have a composition window (popup, toolbar,
whatever) showing what you are typing. This could work the same way as a normal
composition window, but apply the search 'live' as I edited it; for example if I
typed:

sa i to (ctrl-i)

it would first search for links with hiragana sa, then with hiragana sai, then
with hiragana saito, then finally when I hit ctrl-i to make it into katakana,
would abandon the previous search and start looking for katakana SAITO (which is
in the second link on the top bar of that page). 

Same could apply when typing kanji - it would first search (irrelevantly but
how's it to know) for the phonetic characters, then after you hit space and pick
the kanji character, it'd junk that part of the search and do it again for the
kanji.

Of course you'd have to ask a native-speaker (or more relevantly native-typer ;)
what the best way to do this ought to be - personally I barely know any kanji
characters so there's little point me doing type-ahead find for them. Perhaps
there might be no demand for this feature among actual Japanese users, but I
dunno, type-ahead find is pretty convenient in English so...

Comment 1

[s.marshall]

sorry, incorrectly filled in OS/hardware

Comment 2

[Jo Hermans]

It was supposed to be fixed in bug 168281 ????

Comment 3

[s.marshall]

Guh. Apologies - I reported this incorrectly. You're right, it *does* work. The
text is displayed in the status bar, I just missed it before.

As far as I can tell it all works correctly - it doesn't operate 'on the fly'
before you commit the changes from the IME, but after you press return it does
the search and does work both for finding links (typing) and finding any text (/
then typing).

I'm resolving invalid (hope that's correct). Sorry...

--sam

Comment 4

[Patrick]

Should be WFM {worksforme) in that case. 
So, reopening

Comment 5

[Patrick]

and marking wfm

Comment 6

[Patrick]

and verifying on behalf of reporter's comment 3