Re: tlug: Linux and Japanese

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

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tlug note from "Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>
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>>>>> "john" == john wood <jyonw@example.com> writes:

    john> 	I got some mail from some guys at the TLUG, thanks.  I
    john> was reading your Email seciton on the webpage, did a bit of

All you want is Japanese email with a GUI mailer?  I got the
impression from Craig's mail that you were looking for a general
solution for *all* apps.

    john> thinking, and I think I've figured out a better way of doing
    john> this.  But, I need you to help me on one thing.  I cannot
    john> figure out how to get the backspace and delete keys to work
    john> in Kterm while using JVIM. Therefore deleting a character
    john> becomes impossible in JVIM. Ouch.  Also, I think that Kterm
    john> sets the keyboard a bit funny since the @ key doesn't work
    john> either, in fact it sends a carriage return.  If I can fix
    john> both of these I think my theory will work.

Kterm doesn't do anything to the keyboard, as far as I know.  But look
in your app-defaults files (start with ~/.Xresources and the like,
then /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/kterm) to make sure.  If kterm is
doing anything funny, it will probably be in a resource labelled
vt100*translations.  More likely it's been inherited from something
else you did to your keyboard.  However it could be that you have a
patched kterm for use with a Japanese keyboard.  (That's the wrong way
to deal with the problem, but some people write programs like that
anyway.)  Also look in all your startup files (.xsession, .xinitrc,
and the system versions) for xmodmap.

You should also be able to fix whatever happened using the kterm
translations resources and/or xmodmap.  But that's not something
that's easy to explain without my hands on your keyboard....

    john> 1) You can do ALL of your email in Pine, after you set the
    john> editor to JVIM as long as you are running Pine in a
    john> Kterm. Works pretty good.  That would eliminate the need for
    john> you to write email in Emacs or something crazy like that,

Crazy is in the mind of the beholder....  This is exactly what
emacsclient is for; somebody must think it's a good idea :-)

    john> then import into Pine.  It would also work in ELM if I could
    john> figure out how ELM displays messages and set it to the same
    john> way that Pine does.

Both Elm and Pine used to need Japanese patches for bullet proof
operation.  I have wedged both by reading or writing Japanese.  There
is definitely a set of patches for Elm as of about two years ago, I
don't know if Pine has a Japanese version.  Both work OK nearly 100%
of the time, and maybe recent versions will get to 100% (I haven't
used either for a couple of years).  Also, both violate Internet
standards when used this way (more later).

    john> 2) You can do ALL of your email in X. Yup, thats right, its
    john> possible if we can get Xedit to accept Japanese characters
    john> (which I had working at one time).  To do this, what you
    john> would need is a GUI mail proggy for X (there are tons of
    john> them) that will allow you to either select your own, or run

In fact, a lot of them were written by Japanese, specifically with
Japanese Usenet and email in mind.  I can't recommend any, but there
are several in the X11R5 contrib section.  I don't know the X11R6
contrib section very well, but many have probably been updated.  There 
are also some GUI editors there.

    john> an external editor.  If this is possible (in say UMT or any
    john> other GUI mailer) then all the user would need running is

Not exactly.  If you want to comply with Internet standards for mail,
you need a mailer that knows about Japanese.  At a minimum it should
do quoted-printable encoding on Japanese in headers.  If there is raw
Japanese in the headers, there is no telling what some mail transport
systems will do to it.  They are requested to leave it alone, and most
do nowadays, but every once in a while it gives one a stomachache, and
your mail disappears into the bitbucket.  Preferably it should also
translate the message body into New-JIS.  It's *really* bad form for a
transport to munge your message body, and that's very rare.  But some
do....  Mostly, you won't have a problem.  Man-ga-ichi....  It's best
to comply with standards.

Of course, if you don't plan to use any Japanese in headers you're OK.

However, a Japanese-aware mailer can do things like setting the MIME
content-type and so on, which allows smart programs on the receiving
side to do spiffy stuff with messages.  Pine will allow you to set the 
content-type as an option, but it's dumb about it.  The mail is either 
US-ASCII, or it's whatever you configure as your alternate character
set.  Not all mailers go even that far.

    john> kinput2 and the xim to handle the character input. Im not

If you insist on your choice of mailer, you're going to need XIM, and
even then, few mailers will support it.  An alternative path would
be to check out contributed software that supports Japanese via the
kinput or kinput2 protocols.  While these are not standard nor
flexible to non-Japanese environments, they work now, which as far as
I can tell XIM doesn't.

    john> sure what will happen as far as reading the mail X, but as
    john> some GUI mailer do, the text can be not only edited, but
    john> read with Xedit.

    john> Sounds a bit far fetched, but if you can tell me how to fix
    john> the stuff in #1, I think that Abe-san will remember how he
    john> got Xedit to accept Japanese characters.  If this all works,
    john> Japanese in X and shell Linux will be a whole lot easier and
    john> less troublesome.

Xedit evidently supports internationalized fontsets.  I can't convince
it to find Japanese fonts; my C locale support may be the problem.  It
complains about "missing charsets in String to Fontset conversion."
Since I know the fonts are there, I suspect that the problem is that
my locale files don't specify the charsets that are needed.  Maybe
that will help find the problem....  OTOH, I couldn't find any
evidence that Xedit supports internationalized input.  Are you sure
you were typing Japanese into Xedit?  Or just displaying it?

If you actually were typing Japanese into Xedit, then maybe you've got 
an FEP running in the background that steals the keystrokes and remaps 
them.  If so, that might explain why jvim is behaving strangely,
nothing to do with kterm after all.

Or maybe its easier to switch to Emacs/Mule....  The menuing in recent 
versions of Emacs is much better than it used to be.  Under X, it's
almost GUI :-)

Emacs is the Swiss Army Chainsaw of text editors.
    --  from the DJGPP mailing list
Anything that takes up 50 MB of space on my hard drive is not an
editor, it's a religion.
    --  also from the DJGPP mailing list

HTH

-- 
                            Stephen J. Turnbull
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences                    Yaseppochi-Gumi
University of Tsukuba                      http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tel: +81 (298) 53-5091;  Fax: 55-3849              turnbull@example.com
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