Re: Netscape & not-ugly fonts in Japanese?

[Mike Fabian <mfabian@example.com>]

"Rich" <richard@example.com> writes:

> Is it possible to get the latest version of Netscape (4.75) to work in
> Japanese, or is 4.51 the best I can hope for?

Yes, Netscape 4.75 works too with Japanese. You only need the Japanese
app-defaults file for version 4.75 and maybe need to tweak the script
you use to start Netscape to make it find the the Japanese
app-defaults in case of LANG=ja_JP* (i.e. you need to set the
environment variable XFILESEARCHPATH to a suitable value in you
Netscape start script). You can download Japanese app-defaults for
Netscape 4.75 for example from Debian.

> Also, what are the RedHat 6.2-J packages I need to add to RedHat 6.2-E
> to get some nice-looking Japanese fonts in Netscape? I'm not sure
> where the fixed mixed, sony and jis fonts I currently have are coming
> from, but they sure are ugly. Are they in the base XFree86 rpm itself?

These are in the base XFree86 rpm. They are not that bad actually.
But somehow Netscape manages to pick especially bad ones from this set
of fonts.  If I view the same pages with Mozilla or Konqueror, they
look much nicer, although Mozilla and Konqueror choose from the same
set of available fonts. 

You can also get Netscape to produce somewhat better results, you just
have to play a bit with the font settings. But all this font stuff
seems to be quite buggy in Netscape. When I select fonts which produce
nice, readable results for Japanese pages, it often leads to weird
results during Japanese input: Sometimes Japanese characters overlap
during input, especially while doing mixed input of Japanese and
ASCII. Only for certain combinations of western fonts and Japanese
fonts it works OK. It is very tedious to find font settings which work
well for display of pages and input.

-- 
Mike Fabian   <mfabian@example.com>