Re: Good CJK distro

["Tobias Diedrich" <ranma@example.com>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com> wrote:


>     Tobias> What is IIIMP ?
>
> A new general input manager protocol, vaguely like XIM but more
> general (originated in the Java world) and benefiting from the
> experience with XIM.



>     Tobias> in Multilanguage support, i can even input Japanese
>     Tobias> characters using IME2000 and create and use Directories
>     Tobias> with japanese characters in it
>
> You can do this in any reasonable Linux shell, although it takes some
> effort in many cases.

Of course that's one of the many good points of Linux.
You can use nearly all characters for directory and file names ^___________^

>     Tobias> [But this is offtopic anyway ^__^ and has it's own
>     Tobias> Problems... I can't use german umlauts anymore...])
>
> That's not multilingual support then.

Well actually i can use them, but it's not working well with applications
that don't use
unicode. For example I had to rename the Startmenü [Start Menu in english]
Directory because
sometimes new entries would go to the (previously not existing) Startmenu
Directory.
And with all german applications that don't use Unicode strings the japanese
codepage is
used when displaying characters so I see Kanji instead of umlauts.
Of couse this problem can not really be solved without using Unicode (Which
NT always supported IIRC), so I think the applications are to blame for
this.

I kinda expect to have this kind of trouble with Unix too, because most
applications still are not using unicode.

>     Tobias> Does anyone know if there is a project to improve
>     Tobias> multilanguage console support ?
>
> Mule eterm.el?  ;-)
>
> Or do you mean the Linux console?  You could do it in the framebuffer,
> but it will be a bit of work to get the fonts and so on.  You also
> have to make some decisions about how to handle the aspect ratio
> problem (normally Western alphabetic scripts have approximately a 2:1
> aspect ratio, but Asian ideographic scripts are 1:1).  Stick with X11,
> I think....

I did mean the Linux framebuffer console.
It cannot be done in plain text mode anyway...
(Well at least I think that because you only have 256 (or in a slightly
different mode 512)
characters you can display simultaneusly... And you will have to combine 2
textmode characters for one Kanji. One could also think of using some kind
of pseudo graphics mode [using characters of 1 pixel height], but the
textmode "framebuffer" is too small for that. You would need at least
2x80x400=64000 byte, but it's only 32kb)

I was asking this because I was thinking of looking into this part of the
kernel if I find enough spare time for that. I don't like that you have to
run a special program to get CJK console support.
And it shouldn't be all that difficult to enhance the frame buffer console
to do that.

Tobias Diedrich