fonts, gnome, kinput2 and the English language

[Jim Richards <grumpy@cyber4.org>]

Hello all. I'm running the currect testing distribution (sarge?) and this is
where I'm up to with getting things to run.

I've installed various packages to a state when I can get some kana input, in
some places, but not the ones I want (AbiWord) and not as easily as I want.

I've read quite a bit online so far with getting these things to work, including

    file:///usr/share/doc/language-env/README.ja.en.gz
    http://lists.debian.org/debian-japanese/
    http://www.suse.de/~mfabian/suse-cjk/
    http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/02/Feb/0326.html

which seem to give a good indication of what is required. I don't think I've
done the step for making fonts run in AbiWord correctly yet.

I've installed almost all the fonts I can find in Debian that have Japanese
encoding, including

     ttf-kochi-gothic-naga10
     ttf-kochi-mincho-naga10
     xfonts-shinonome

and a few others (that seem to be important) such as

     gs-cjk-resource
     ng-cjk-canna
     kon2
     kfbterm
     kterm
     jless

I've got kinput2 and cannaserver running correctly (it took me hours to work
out that gnome doesn't call your .xsession file but one called .gnomerc
instead if you start with a gnome session, as opposed to an xsession - duh!)

My .gnomerc file now has

     XMODIFIERS="@im=kinput2"
     export XMODIFIERS

     xmodmap -e 'keycode 115 = Kanji'
     kinput2-canna &

keycode 115 is the windows logo key, I thought it would be appropriate. (After
using Japanese keyboards in windows, where there's a key next to space bar for
kana input, this was a respite from always turning it on with a wayward thumb.)

I've run

     dpkg-reconfigure locales

To build the fonts and other configuration requirements for both ja_JP.EUC
and ja_JP.UTF-8. I also have it set with en_AU as my primary locale.

I would run the script set-language-env but all the messages are in
Japanese. My Nihon-go isn't that good yet ;-) Maybe I'll go through
/usr/share/language-env and just do the mods by hand.

I want to have English menus but the ability to input Japanese, everywhere (well,
everywhere that xim works within gnome). My main goal is to do this within AbiWord
(which I have read previously here that Debian support for Japanese in AbiWord isn't
there, but as I said above, I think it comes down to font file manipulations), but
other things like mozilla would be good as well. I think it just comes down to font
configuration now.

Previously to today, when I ran something like

     LC_CTYPE=ja_JP vi -g

I'd get these errors

     The font "-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal-*-*-80-*-*-p-*-iso8859-1" does not support all the required character sets for the current locale "LC_CTYPE=ja_JP;LC_NUMERIC=en_AU;LC_TIME=en_AU;LC_COLLATE=en_AU;LC_MONETARY=en_AU;LC_MESSAGES=en_AU;LC_PAPER=en_AU;LC_NAME=en_AU;LC_ADDRESS=en_AU;LC_TELEPHONE=en_AU;LC_MEASUREMENT=en_AU;LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_AU"
       (Missing character set "JISX0208.1983-0")
       (Missing character set "JISX0201.1976-0")

In gnome, I have my default menu font set to

     -shinonome-gothic-medium-r-normal-*-*-130-*-*-c-*-jisx0201.1976-0

(may have typo in there) which means those errors don't appear any more.

So, now if I run vi -g, I get the characters of the double bytes being displayed (not
the kana). There is a font option in vi -g, but it still doesn't do it for me.

If I run this

     LC_CTYPE=ja_JP gnome-terminal &

Then I can input kana, or within mozilla

    LC_CTYPE=ja_JP mozilla &

I can enter kana, such as

    ????

Which should say katakana. (PS: How do I change between hiragana and katakana
in kinput2?)

But if I put (using ksh as my shell here)

    export LC_CTYPE=ja_JP

in my .profile then gnome doesn't start because anywhere I've used a helvetica
font (for example, sawfish's window titles) then it won't start with errors
like I had above. I don't want to have to set the LC_CTYPE everytime I run something,
but a few people had scripts to do this, so that might be an option if all
else fails.

I'd like to have the adobe fonts as my default fonts, like helvetica and
times, and courier for fixed width, with the ability to input the kana when I
need to.

As much as like using Debian, I have it about 90% configured to the way I want,
but the last 10% is going to take 90% of the time.

Thanks, in advance for any help or suggestions. By the time I get this worked
out, this email and it's thread should be a good resource for the next person
who comes along.


(Another ps: how do I stop kinput2 using shift-space and ctrl-o as the keystroke
combination. I just want the windows ket to do it ...)




(If you want to know what the last 10% is, it's things like getting the scroller
on my laptop to work, yes I have ZAxisMapping "4 5" setting in XF86Config-4,
anti-aliasing with gdkxft to wkr correctly, sound with alsa-sound or any sound
as an SiS 7012 chipset that doesn't behave, watching dvd's, although I found some
more info about that recently, and getting the WebAppConnection to work between
apache and tomcat4 as well as getting the security policys to work on specific
jar's with a codebase setting in the grant { } section. At least, that's what I
can think of at the moment.)