[tlug] Viewing Japanese in Firefox... in RHEL3

["Josh Glover" <jmglov@example.com>]

I have quite an unusual problem: I cannot read Japanese in Firefox.
This is despite the fact that the last time I had difficulty doing
this, the year was 2000 and I was using Red Hat 7.3.

So here's the situation:

I have to use RHEL3 (as in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 update 8) for
reasons that I won't go into so as to avoid spewing a stream of
profanity onto the list. When I pull up Firefox and hit a Japanese
page, such as http://www.google.co.jp/ (UTF-8) or
http://www.yahoo.co.jp/ (EUC-JP), I see hiragana and katakana, but all
of the kanji are the dreaded Unicode codepoint ones (i.e. instead of
displaying actual glyphs, like æç, they display 691C 7D22 in two
little boxes). OK, this means that I have a font that does not support
Japanese, right? Though it is odd that hiragana and katakana show up
and kanji does not.

So I install the Microsoft core fonts[1] by following the procedure on
the webpage, and restart xfs and X itself, just to be sure. The newly
installed fonts show up in my font selection box in Firefox, but the
kanji still are not rendered when I visit a Japanese webpage.

To be more specific, I have done the following in Firefox:

Edit -> Preferences -> Content -> Fonts & Colors -> Advanced -> Japanese

Proportional: Sans Serif
Serif: Arial
Sans-serif: Courier New
Monospace: Trebuchet MS

I have unchecked the box that says, "Allow pages to choose their own
fonts, instead of my selections above"

I have made the same selections for Western languages, just for shits
and giggles.

However, I still get Unicode boxes instead of kanji.

If anyone has a clue what could be going wrong, or just understands
all this font crap and wants to help me out, that would be terrific.

I have Googled much, but if you have a magical combination of search
terms that will give me the solution to this problem, please feel free
to beat me with the cluebat.

Cheers,
Josh

[1] http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/