A basic understanding of keyboards and how they work around the world can help avoid problems in application development.
Input method editors
Languages such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean require a more elaborate mechanism to enter characters from the keyboard. This is known as an Input method editor (IME). An IME is a program in the windowing system which takes multiple keystokes and converts them to a character. IME's often use dictionaries and present the user a list of possible conversions. See the topic Introduction to input method editors for more details about how IME's work.
