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Re: Language support



From: Michael Sobolev <mss@transas.com>
Subject: Re: Language support
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 1999 23:51:48 +0300

> 3.  We do need fonts to display those messages.  12 of them are using latin
>     characters of some kind plus Russian that uses KOI8-R, plus Japanese that
>     uses something quite special :).  LatArCyrHeb covers 13 languages, what
>     gives us 4K plus a couple of Ks for acms (that are needed!).  I do not
>     know how large Japanese fonts are.
> 
> That's all.  This gives 170K without Japanese stuff.  Is it too much?  I heard
> there were successful experiments with 2,8M images.  These are certainly
> suitable for CD booting.  We must provide multilanguage installation in this
> case, though we may want to provide a special image (root disk??) for every
> supported language.

With regard to Japanese, font size wouldn't be a problem. The package
"konfont" provides Japanese fonts which are used to display Japanese
characters on console with the package "kon2".

% ls -l /usr/share/fonts/kon
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root         1343 May 20  1999 pubfont.a.gz
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root       114095 May 20  1999 pubfont.k.gz

Yes that's too large for one language, however we'll be able to
extract the characters really used in the installation process (namely
characters used in ja.po messages) and create tiny fonts. So we can
assume that's something like the worst case.

The real problem is how we can display Japanese on console. Currently
console-tools doesn't support Japanese. And kon2 described above
doesn't work for all archs. Another promising method is to use the
package "jfbterm", a framebuffer-based multilingual terminal (but
needs extra disk space (not so much though) and framebuffer-enabled
kernel-image of course).

Japanese developers have been discussing on this problem, but
currently don't come to the conclusion. But keep these issue in your
mind, please.

-- 
Keita Maehara <maehara@debian.org>


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