combining japanese and german or french characters

mickywicky

I'll write this in english so more people have access to it. I seem to remember reading a long time ago that pango would make Gnome UTF8 or Unicode-capable. I am looking for the possibility of using Japanese side-by-side with German or even French in Gnome, i.e. enabling display of Japanese chars like あ or 東京 together with European chars like ß ä or ü.
I was using this in my Sessions/Gnome file:

export XMODIFIERS="@im=kinput2"
export LANGUAGE=en_GB
export LANG=ja_JP.eucJP
export LC_ALL=ja_JP.eucJP
kinput2 -canna &

How do you guys suggest I do to improve the display of German chars? Right now typing ä in Balsa returns nothing at all, and in emails I receive those chars are either garbled or just not displayed. But Japanese is perfectly fine, but for one thing, that date, time and system messages are in Japanese, whereas I'd rather have that in English, but it's a detail.
Any ideas?
I tried defining a ja_JP.utf-8 locale, but Xlib didn't like it, maybe it needs being rebuilt.

Thanx

Micky
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lt = (1+1) * 3 * 3 * 37 = The prime factorization of The Beast

erwan · Apprentice Joined: 01 Jun 2003 Posts: 150 Location: Tokyo

I am French living in Japan so I know well this problem ! Actually, you're right, thanks to pango Gnome is now the best way to combine non-ascii languages.

In email, it is a different problem ; since there are several encoding, usually western Europe encoding or eucJP, sjis if you receive email from Japanese Windows users. It has no relation with your locale, it just depends on your mailer - most of them try an automatic detection and allow user to select it by hand when it fails.

For unicode, you have to add nls in USE and rebuild at least you glibc. Then you have to generate locale:

localedef -v -c -i en_GB -f UTF-8 en_GB.UTF-8

Switch to unicode will help you especially to input German and Japanese on the same session.
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See me on Jabber: erwan@im.loisant.org

mickywicky · Posted: Sun Jun 08, 2003 4:42 pm Post subject:

I suspected as much.
Hm so you're telling me I should persist in that direction, UTF-8 does actually work that way if I do it right?
Will keep trying then

_________________
lt = (1+1) * 3 * 3 * 37 = The prime factorization of The Beast

mickywicky · Posted: Tue Jun 17, 2003 6:39 pm Post subject:

Mister Frenchman, j'espere que vous pourrez m'aider

I defined a ja_JP.UTF-8 locale as follows:

localedef -v -c -i ja_JP -f UTF-8 ja_JP.UTF-8

using it for LC_ALL and then launching balsa, it *almost* works !!
öäü mix very well with japanese chars.
The last thing missing is ß
That seems like no locale can do it unless it a german locale...
If you have any ideas, they are most welcome. I'll keep trying, will post my results if any.

Micky
_________________
lt = (1+1) * 3 * 3 * 37 = The prime factorization of The Beast

zhenlin · Veteran Joined: 09 Nov 2002 Posts: 1361

Is that a German/Central European sharp S or a Greek beta?

mickywicky · Posted: Wed Jun 18, 2003 10:33 am Post subject:

it's the german sharp S... any experience with that?
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lt = (1+1) * 3 * 3 * 37 = The prime factorization of The Beast

zhenlin · Veteran Joined: 09 Nov 2002 Posts: 1361

None, but I do know that from time to time, if you specify LANG="..." or LC_CTYPE="...", a different font with the glyphs that are neccessary for that language is loaded instead. Perhaps the font that is being used does not have the sharp-S and the renderer can't be bothered to find one that does.

mickywicky · Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2003 10:53 am Post subject:

good one, mister, thanx. I'll have a look, if I don't post again (for those who stumble upon this while searching the fora), it means he was right

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lt = (1+1) * 3 * 3 * 37 = The prime factorization of The Beast

erwan · Apprentice Joined: 01 Jun 2003 Posts: 150 Location: Tokyo

For display use gtk2 applications is the best. Pango can choose the right font according the language and you can mix é, ß, 愛.
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See me on Jabber: erwan@im.loisant.org

mickywicky · Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2003 3:50 pm Post subject:

Hmm close, very close...
So all of my gtk2 apps can now display ß ü and 国際関係 together, which is wicked.
Except for the only app that matters, i.e. Balsa

Funny, I'd understand it doesn't work when using ISO-2022-JP, but when using UTF-8....
It mostly works, I only miss the ß, which is displayed as a blank space. The same font in gedit can display all of the above without a flaw.
Maybe I'll enquire on the balsa list if I can figure out why.

Micky
_________________
lt = (1+1) * 3 * 3 * 37 = The prime factorization of The Beast