Re: German umlauts in japanese RedHat 6.2 don't work

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Mike" == Mike Fabian <mfabian@example.com> writes:

    Mike> kterm. For example, when displaying English man-pages in
    Mike> kterm

    Mike>    ~$ LANG=C man man

    Mike> I see a linefeed at all places where a line ends with a
    Mike> hyphen (-),

I haven't noticed this; I'll have to take a look.  I do read manpages
all the time in kterms, though; maybe Debian messes with the configs.
Hmm ... nope, line-ending hyphens are fine.  _However_, they are all
"hard" hyphens (ie, the word contains a hyphen as normally spelled).
Maybe this only happens on soft hyphens (inserted for the purpose of
better line-breaking)?

Anyway "ugly" is different from "can't" -- can rxvt handle both Japanese
and German in the same window?

    >> Footnotes: [1] I admit it, I still use pTeX.  It's very high on
    >> my list of priorities to replace.

    Mike> Why? I have not yet used pTeX and your comment sounds like I
    Mike> shouldn't try. What is the problem with pTeX?

I haven't tried to use it with large English documents in a long time,
but the last time I tried there were wrapping and hyphenation problems
in some places.  It failed TRIP as of 4 years ago; I haven't tried
recently.

The biggest problem is that it requires a Japanese environment; it
produces output that crashes stock xdvi and dvips, and dvips-ja
produces output an ordinary Ghostscript can't easily handle.
Fortunately the Japanese versions work well enough with English
documents.

Unfortunately the Debian maintainers of the Japanese versions
regularly screw up the dependencies, so that I cannot reliably keep my
environment up-to-date in the very unstable environment that is Debian
woody; I've just taken to uninstalling all the Japanese stuff and
reinstalling it --force-depends.[1] Only in the last few months has it
become possible to update teTeX without losing all the pTeX mods to
texmf.cnf etc.

So it's not that it's unusable, it's just that it requires me to make
special adjustments for Japanese, including keeping multiple copies of
some programs (to shut up the package manager).  I would rather not.


Footnotes: 
[1]  Yes, having a wide pipe at work is very very nice.

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