Re: KDE, unicode messege files, non-unicode font?

[Mike Fabian <mfabian@example.com>]

Marc Christensen <marc@example.com> writes:

> I was wondering if it's possible to set up KDE in which the messages files
> (menu entries, helo files, etc) are in Unicode but display them using a
> noon-unicode font?  There should be some mapping for translations and
> charsets somewhere, right?

Yes, of course, you don't have to use a unicode font. This is only
necessary if you want to use many languages at the same time in
KDE, for example if you want to use Japanese and German at the same time.

> I'm having problems, as I mentioned before, where the unicode font I'm
> testing takes a very long time to render and is rendered each time an app
> uses it.  This can be fixed by using freetype to render it but this is
> only supported using an Xserver that supports the XRENDER extension and
> therefore is not a general solution as the XRENDER extension is only
> supported by some X servers at this point.

You can try the font server xfs, it helps a little bit because
in that case only the application waiting for the font freezes
until the font is opened. When you are using the "freetype" or
"xtt" module of XFree86 instead, the whole X-server freezes until
the font is opened.

> So, I'm looking into switching to non-Unicode fonts that render much
> quicker.  Also, there are more free TTF and bitmapped non-Unicode
> available than Unicode at thia point.

Yes, if you only need Japanese and English, using non-Unicode
fonts in KDE 2 is currently more practical.

-- 
Mike Fabian   <mfabian@example.com>   http://www.suse.de/~mfabian
睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。