OpenVanilla - A Non-Intrusive Plug-In Framework of Text Services

Input method (IM) is a sine qua non for text entry of many Asian languages, but its potential applications on other lan- guages remain under-explored. This paper proposes a phi- losophy of input method design by seeing it as a non- intrusive plug-in text service framework. Such design al- lows new functionalities of text processing to be attached onto a running application without any tweaking of code. We also introduce OpenVanilla, a cross-platform frame- work that is designed with the above-mentioned model in mind. Frameworks like OpenVanilla have shown that an input method can be more than just a text entry tool: it of- fers a convenient way for developing various text service and language tools.