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Japanese with X
krynos asks:
"I'm currently learning Japanese (third human language) and
I would like to know how to be able to display and input
Japanese characters in X. What programs and fonts do I need
and where can I find them? "
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Ok, since we're on the topic, can anyone give help on setting up Linux to read and write Hangul (Korean fonts)? I've found various fonts and such, but do I need to have my x-windows set up to display only Hangul, or can I have one account use x-windows in English and another account use Hangul? I'd like to help my gf be able to write email to her family, and I'm still scratching my head on figuring this problem out!
If you use Slackware or Red Hat, try PJE.
- e/PJE-HOWTO.eng.html
http://www.pje.linux.or.jp/Howto/PJE-0.1.5/html
My question: What about Chinese? Anybody have any tips on that, besides what's
already in the CHINESE-Howto? Thanx!
I'm not entirely sure on the other stuff, but it's not a horribly difficult task to make Netscape work with it. You'd need the XFree "other fonts" (fnon.tgz IIRC) package, and simply set Netscape's encoding to Japanese(Auto-Detect). It wrecks your normal english fonts, but you can always set it back to Western encoding.
Sometimes you get the Jap encoding whether you like it or not. Debian.org's language selection is a little screwy at the moment and comes up in japanese no matter what for me, even though I'm set to western and english is the preferred language.
IE5 has an input IME you can download, but M$ crippled it so it only works with IE and Outlook. As soon as you switch to another app, the IME is gone. Why is M$ so resistant to making all the foreign language fonts and IMEs available. I mean, you can't even _buy_ language add-ons from M$. I do not understand why.
(not logged in because of laziness =P)
I have been wondering much the same thing myself. I have Debian-JP and it works most beautifully for most tasks, as long as you don't upgrade to GLIBC 2.1. That breaks the wrapper that does proper international support.. *sigh* But The Gimp has been most obstinant. There is very little documentation on its I18N features, but I know that you must start by getting a JP-friendly GTK+ working. It requires a 1.2 or better, so you'd need a newer Gimp (1.0.7, or whatever it was, or a 1.1.x). There's a screen shot of it doing exactly what we want on the cover of a recent Linux Journal, though, DARN IT! It's got to be in there somewhere ^_^
frohike
Posted by Mike Rothberg:
:)
Boy this is an old article. Hope someone can still make use of this
In order to view Japanese characters in a program, the program appearently has to be compilied with a compilier set up to do double byte character translations. In other words, you have to download the source for gcc or whatever, and compile it on your own to include Japanese extensions. Then recompile all the programs that you want to be able to support those extensions.
I have been able to get Japanese characters to display on WindowMaker menus, but have not had good luck recompiling the gnome sources. Anyway, it has been a long time since I have done that, so there may be a few more steps.
I think it was mentioned above, but Debian also has a Japanese distribution.
If all you want to do is send and recieve email, krxvt (kterm), cannaserver, and kinput2 was the method I was using a year or so ago. If you can read Japanese, I strongly suggest checking out what some of the Linux users are doing here in Japan. Ganbatte!
Well If you only want to display, then you can just use netscape in Japanese decode mode.
If you also want to enter text then you need to build kterm kinput2 and one of the dictionaries like canna or wnn, when set up properly you can enter text in japanese enabled programs, like Mule, or even Netscape.
You might want to take a look at turbolinux's jp ftp site, for s/rpms. ftp://ftp.pht.co.jp/ or perhaps the japansese debian site http://www.debian.or.jp/
If you are running glibc 2 you need to make sure that it is internationalised, RH 5.2 does not seem to be compiled this way.
Beware though sometimes it is a bit hard to get all these things running there is not so much documentation on this in english.
Good Luck !
To simply VIEW documents encoded in japanese, just take a file that's encoded with high-bit ascii and open it with netscape, and change the encoding to japanese. I'm not sure where you can pick these fonts up (they are in the standard distribution of Athena).
However, if you want to be able to EDIT japanese files, you'll need to use something like mule (multilanguage emacs), unless you're good with decoding high-bit ascii :)
To print these, look for jlpr, which takes a given input file and converts the high-bit ascii japanese characters to postscript. it's pretty nifty, but I'm not sure it exists outside of MIT's network (not sure if we wrote it).
Good luck,
Ken
I'm dealing with this issue myself.
Check out this web page:
http://www.twics.com/~craig/writings/linux-niho
It's a little outdated, but it has a lot of good information about the various programs and utilities that are available.
If you use debian, check out the Japanese debian distribution (debian-jp) at ftp.debian.or.jp.
There are often Japan-ized versions of programs
that are very good.
Probably my favorite thing that I have found is JTeX. It's TeX that can handle Japanese characters. I use it for writing letters and doing Japanese homework sometimes. I don't know how to make it print vertically, but I'm sure someone's already done it.
Question:
Does anyone know how to use Japanese characters with The Gimp? I've tried cutting and pasting Japanese characters from either MULE or a kterm, but I can never get them to input correctly in the text tool of The Gimp. I imagine it is probably more closely related to gtk+, but I couldn't find any documentation on this in the gtk+ or Gimp web sites. Thanks.
If you're using xfstt, you should be able to use Japanese true type fonts with the Gimp without any problems.
Stephan