multilanguage support (many replies)

[invalid at pizzashack.org (Derek Martin)]

On Thu, Jan 29, 2004 at 08:57:38AM -0800, miah wrote:
> I dont know about debian, but I can say that Turbolinux is excellent
> for Koren/Japanese/Chinese.  

Well, Red Hat is fine for Korean too, if that's all you want to do.
The trouble is when you normally want to work in one language, but
have frequent occasion to use the other.  This is much trickier, and
UTF-8 is the right answer.  However, most distributions are only
part-way there as yet...

To be honest, I can do most of what I want to do already, and it's not
too bad.  But in order to type Korean (in a terminal), I currently
need to use Hanterm, whereas I normally use xterm.  I also need to run
an IME to use Korean with Mozilla, which is normal for using Korean...
But it seems like some programs can't/won't use it...

Thomas Dickey, the maintainer of xterm (or one of them), tells me that
xterm can do it, but Red Hat lacks a variety of support needed to make
it happen.  I heard someone talk about what they went through to make
their system totally UTF-8, and it sounded a little bit like making
your own distro from scratch...  So I was hoping that some distro
(debian seemed the most likely) was already 100% there...

As for English + Korean on RH9, some of the problems seem to be that
either a) Unicode fonts containing both latin letters and Korean
glyphs are missing from the system, and/or b) many applications do not
know how to properly switch between fonts when different encodings are
required.  Mozilla is an example of a program which does this well;
xmms is an example of one that does not.

In the latter cases, it may be possible to tell the application what
to do using something called "font sets", but I have as yet not found
any useful information about that...  This is what I will research
next.  It may be a simple solution.  Also xmms clearly has support for
this, as there is an option for it in font preferences.


On Thu, Jan 29, 2004 at 11:55:07AM -0500, Cole Tuininga wrote:
> 
> Derek - 
> 
> I use Debian stable with some extra repositories (listed below in case
> you or anybody else is interested).  While I don't have a lot of call of
> asian characters, I do occasionally read some japanese web sites and the
> fonts appear to get displayed correctly with all the extra font packages
> I have installed.  Oh yeah, my asian spam gets displayed "correctly" in
> evolution as well.  8)
> 
> I am doing all of this in gnome.

Well, this is a good point.  Gnome applications (and Mozilla) seem to
have no trouble doing the right thing.  For example, xmms does not
display the Korean title of my ogg files correctly, but Gnome's window
list (on the task bar) /does/.  It's obviously using the same exact
characters to represent the title, but one program knows what to do,
and the other doesn't.

I guess this isn't so much a distribution-specific problem as it is an
application problem...


On Thu, Jan 29, 2004 at 12:37:19PM -0500, Jon maddog Hall wrote:
> Derek,
> 
> Why not use one of the Korean distributions?

This is an interesting suggestion.  Initially I wrote off the Korean
distros, because I assumed they would have the opposite problem:
Korean is easy, but English is difficult.

On the other hand, Korea is English-crazy, and if anyone has figured
out how to use both English and Korean easily, it's probably the
Koreans...  ;-)

I still think that the distros will be heavily Hangeul-centric, and my
Korean is really not that good, which I suspect would make it very
difficult to actually use Korean Linux on a daily basis.  We have
computers at work with Korean Windows, and I'm often lost there...
Though sometimes I can get by if I happen to know some of the words,
or more likely if I recognize the menu pattern and keyboard shortcuts
used for the menu options...  :)  Though unfortunately, even though
they're often the same as their English counterparts, they're often
different.

Still, this might be an option to look into.


On Fri, Jan 30, 2004 at 12:13:20PM -0500, Robert La Ferla wrote:
> Is there a way to edit Japanese (Unicode UTF-8) documents via a ssh 
> terminal session or is it only possible thru X-windows.  I'd like to 
> edit UTF-8 documents on a Linux server which I am logged in from a 
> Windows 2000 client (with the IME) and SecureCRT.

Hmmm...  Well from Linux to Linux I have no trouble doing this in
Korean using Hanterm (a version of xterm with support for entering
Korean characters).  I have also done it from Windows XP with Korean
support to a Linux server using Tera Term Pro and its TTSSH plug-in.
FWIW, PuTTY did /NOT/ work, because it seems to have trouble with wide
(multi-byte) characters.  So I guess SecureCRT may or may not work.
You might try Tera Term Pro and TTSSH, which is unfortunately only
compatible with the SSH1 protocol.  :(

HTH.  =8^)

?? ? ?? ????!
[Happy (Chinese) New Year!]

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
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