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locales other than US and encoding issues



Hi all,

I installed the Debian 3.0 from the 1st CD - I do not have the other ones. I 
need to be able to read and write in Bulgarian - for this reason I have to 
use encoding cp-1251. It is not included in KDE COntrol Center and thus I 
cannot switch to the desired encoding.
When I set the default locale to be bg_BG CP1251 using debconf, KDE did not 
react, while Gnome tried to replace all menu items with Bulgarian words, but 
not having the cyrillic fonts I presume it displayed garbled Latin symbols.
I tried to change fonts but there were no cyrillic fonts either in Gnome or in 
KDE. In fact, in the fonts directory, there are no cyrillic fonts installed. 
Are they included in the 2nd or 3rd CD?
However I am afraid it is more than just a fonts issue. For, running similar 
configuration under Slackware 8.1 does not support cyrillic output either. I 
managed to install cp-1251 cyrillic fonts (the X-server acually has some 
cyrillic fonts that are partially usable), and I am able to type in Bulgarian 
in Open Office applications and to read Bulgarian content in Mozilla. But 
texts having Microsoft encoding (.txt or html code) are not displayed with 
cyrillic characters. And texts I wrote that are displayed correctly in the 
text editor (kedit) - they cannot be read by anybody else. Gnome editors can 
not even reach that far - cyrillic characters are simply ignored.
So, finally it is all about encoding (Slackware's KDE 3 does not have cp-1251 
either). My question is, how can I change encoding at my will, in KDE and 
Gnome, so that I am able to read and write in both graphic environments? My 
system has to be used in multilingual environment, because apart from 
Bulgarian I also use Greek, and in my previous experience (Mandrake 8.1) they 
could not co-exist - after setting the Bulgarian locale, Greek accents could 
not be typed.
I know there is a tool called bglinux, which is great and does everything I 
mentioned above, except that it spoils Greek accents.
And all of this was not an issue in KDE1 on old SuSE 6.3 and 7.0 systems - all 
you had to do is change fonts - greek or cyrillic just like in Windows 
Notepad - and do all you want.
Thanks in advance for all hints on locales and encoding. I will much 
appreciate all help, for it is an issue for many Bulgarian users who would 
switch to Linux if it were made that easy.
Chavdar



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