Restore/minimize the Language Bar to get it out of the way of a full-screen application?

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2010/05/12 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/05/12/10010566.aspx

Over in the Suggestion Box, Ben asked:

Like many, I am really enjoying Windows 7.

However, there is one little issue that I notice almost daily.

As I am constantly switching between English, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, I usually always "Restore the [IME] language bar" on the desktop. Hence, it is not minimized to the tray. This is my preferred setting.

Whenever I watch a movie in Media Player, I set the screen to full size. This works well; however, the IME bar never disappears instead overlays the video. As there is not much opportunity to type anything while watching a movie in full screen, I think it would be best if the IME would become invisible.

I do not remember anymore, but I do not recall having this type of problem in XP. Other than manually minimizing it, is there anything that can be done to solve this tiny but constant issue? Not sure if this would be an IME or a Media Player issue.

One has to love the "one little issue" questions, you know? :-)

First we'll take a step back.

And say that yes, this is a Media Player issue.

Because Media Player can implement UILess Mode for when it is completely maximized if it wants to.

But it isn't doing that, so we have to move on now and see what we can do in spite of that fact.

So we will keep looking, now.

Of course the easiest thing one can do is the minimize/restore dance....

but Ben is already saying that is the thing he's like to avoid.

Now there ianother option, on that same menu.

That Transparency item:

If you select it, then the language bar will be a lot less substantial when you aren't interacting with it.

Like this:

This may or may not be distracting, kind of depends.

That "Vertical" option can also be worth considering, though most people don't like to go that route.

Now if you use your IMEs so often that you do all of the interaction via the various keyboard shortcuts, then you have yet another option.

Hot keys!

Just assign a different hot key to each IME you want to

and then hide the Language Bar completely!

But a lot of people (and I am assuming Ben is one of them) want the Language Bar to be there when they might be using the IME.

And this limits the options a lot more.

Now at an obvious level there is a user interface that lets one pick the "status" of the Language Bar's interface:

This suggests there must be a way for anyone to make that change.

Now spulenking around in the exports of various relevant DLLs finds the following:

Microsoft (R) COFF/PE Dumper Version 9.00.30729.01
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

Dump of file c:\Windows\System32\msctf.dll

File Type: DLL

  Section contains the following exports for MSCTF.dll

    00000000 characteristics
    4A5BC5DC time date stamp Mon Jul 13 16:40:12 2009
        0.00 version
           1 ordinal base
          71 number of functions
          71 number of names

    ordinal hint RVA      name

          2    0 0000382C CtfImeAssociateFocus
...{skip some exports}
         55   35 0001A05C TF_GetShowFloatingStatus
...{skip some exports}
         68   43 00072ED0 TF_SetShowFloatingStatus
...{skip some exports}
         71   46 00041470 TF_WaitForInitialized

  Summary

        3000 .data
        A000 .pdata
       18000 .rdata
        2000 .reloc
       41000 .rsrc
       A0000 .text

But it hardly seems worth it to try to reverse engineer those functions, which are in all likelihood little more than thin wrappers around the ITfLangBarMgr::ShowFloating and ITfLangBarMgr::GetShowFloatingStatus methods on the ITfLangBarMgr interface.

If the code were any more complicated than something along the lines of:

    HRESULT hr;
    ITfLangBarMgr *pLangBarMgr = NULL;

    hr = CoCreateInstance(CLSID_TF_LangBarMgr, NULL, CLSCTX_INPROC_SERVER, IID_ITfLangBarMgr, (LPVOID*)&pLangBarMgr);
    if (SUCCEEDED(hr) && pLangBarMgr)
    {
        pLangBarMgr->ShowFloating(TF_SFT_MINIMIZED);
        pLangBarMgr->Release();
    }

(mostly snagged from the interface help topic!) then I would frankly be shocked.

Is it worth creating some little EXE that when run will detect what the state is and toggle it between TF_SFT_MINIMIZED and TF_SFT_SHOWNORMAL?

Well, I would leave that up to Ben or whoever is interested here.

Given an application that doesn't do the work to move the IME out of the way, that would really be the most one can do here....

richard on 12 May 2010 10:31 AM:

ray on 12 May 2010 12:16 PM:

Niels on 12 May 2010 12:18 PM:

Ben on 12 May 2010 3:40 PM:

Michael S. Kaplan on 12 May 2010 8:38 PM:

richard on 13 May 2010 9:09 AM:

jmdesp on 13 May 2010 3:59 PM:

shiranaize on 16 May 2010 6:00 PM:

JFullert on 26 Jan 2012 2:29 PM:

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