Re: [tlug] The wrong kanji

[Travis Cardwell <travis.cardwell@example.com>]

On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 12:19 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull
<stephen@example.com> wrote:
> Travis Cardwell writes:
>  > priority regardless of the locale.  This means, of course, that though
>  > Japanese text will be fixed, Chinese text will have some Japanese
>  > glyphs.  I do not know how to fix this issue in a generic way; I do
>  > not think fontconfig was designed with this problem in mind,
>  > unfortunately.
>
> fontconfig can't fix it.  It's a problem with the concept of "locale"
> on one side, and with Unicode on the other.  I agree with with Unicode
> that Han should be unified, but it does make it impossible to identify
> language in plain text (Plane 14 tags notwithstanding).

While it is not possible to identify (with certainty) the language of
plain text, applications that are designed to be multilingual may have
more knowledge.  For example, web browsers can be informed of such
information via meta tags.  An enterprising web browser could even
control which fonts are used in such a situation to render the text so
that Chinese and Japanese text is displayed correctly even within the
same web page.  What I meant above is that fontconfig is not designed
with this level of control: there is no way to tell it the language of
the text it is rendering.

> OTOH, the POSIX semantics for locale are just horrible.  The
> assumption is that it's good enough to localize for the dominant
> language of the user.  Note that we have a user who wants to use
> Japanese a lot, and keep Chinese installed, but work in an "en" locale
> for messages and the like.  POSIX locale is basically designed to make
> that maximally painful.

POSIX locale is designed to take care of the common case, and this
happens to be at the expense of the special case.

> I suspect that if apps, which usually have out-of-band hints about
> language available to them, were to reset the POSIX locale based on
> language, fontconfig would DTRT.  But that would suck from an app
> writer's point of view.  Setting locale is a syscall, and a pretty
> heavy one at that.  And identifying and keeping track of language
> would not be easy, either.

I do not know of any applications that change locale settings like
this.  Applications that make use of multiple languages tend to
control the fonts themselves.

>  > editing /etc/fonts/conf.d/69-langauge-selector-ja-jp.conf:
>
> Is that your misspelling of "language", or Ubunto's?

That would be my own. :)

Travis