Subject: mulitlingual documents under XFree
From: Tomas Frydrych (tomas@frydrych.uklinux.net)
Date: Thu Jan 04 2001 - 14:39:16 CST
I have been making some enquiries about the problem of creating
multilingual documents and it appears that from the point of view of
the keyboard input the only sensible way to achieve this under
XFree will be to use UTF-8 locale, e.g., en_US.UTF-8 and run AW
from a unicode capable version of xterm. Unfortunately, to be able
to do this, one has to get XFree86 4.0.2 (4.0.1 is not utf-8
capable!), glibc 2.2 (or follow the rather cumbersome workaround
described in the Unicode Howto for 2.1), and get the latest version
of xterm and compile it with --enable-wide-chars. Having done all of
this, one should be able to switch keyboards using xmodmap (I
have been warned by folk on the linux-utf8 list that the KDE
keyboard switcher has a bug in it that forces Qt into Latin-1 mode
and probably will not work). I have not had a chance to test any of
this yet myself.
However, this will only work if the necessary fonts are available and
AW knows how to use them; may be if we need to ship a font to
fall back on, it should be a full-blown Unicode font.
Tomas
> On Wed, Jan 03, 2001 at 08:10:46PM +0400, hvv@hippo.ru wrote:
> > On Sun, 31 Dec 2000, Kevin Vajk wrote:
> > > I still don't understand. If I want to write a document containing
> > > English, Thai, and Lao, how is this going to work?
> >
> > I think there are two solutions - either you invent new locale
> > that includes characters of English, Thai and Lao (providing
> > locale description to glibc), or you use some unicode locale (most
> > probably utf8). In the former case, (and if your X server was setup
> > appropriately) you would be able to type any "character" of any
> > lagnuage that has a unicode value assigned, provided
> > you have unicode font installed.
> >
>
> Or switch locale and reload fontset for different languages. I think
> some Sun guys suggest this on the XFree86's i18n lists.
>
> Since we have this deferglyph thing, the penalty might not be too
> big, for xfree86.
>
> We definitely need language tag.
>
> --
> Best regard
> hashao
>
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