Re: reading/writing Greek in Evolution (on English system)

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

On Thu, May 16, 2002 at 07:05:51AM -0700, David Carson wrote:

> This question can probably apply to other
> non-Latin-alphabet languages as well.
> 
> I have the following setup:
> - Mandrake 8.2
> - US English is primary language
> - asked for Greek as second language during install

That is not "Greek as second language", but instead "files and packages
for supporting Greek are installed".

But for them to be used you have still to do something.

> I regularly read and write Greek correspondence, but
> my primary language setup is English.
> 
> 1. How do I read Greek messages?  I have tried

In Gnome2 it is supposed to work nicely out of the box (utf-8 used
internally, and nice fontset aliases available).

But for Gnome1.x the easiest for you would be to run under
a Greek locale, just set the LANGUAGE variable to "C" (so no translations
are used, the interface is in English), but the LC_CTYPE is set to
Greek locale, so the X11 fontsets and keyboard input cover iso-8859-7
encoding and Greek is displayed/typed correctly.

Of course such configuration is only possible if you want to use
Greek and an ascii-only language (which is the case of English).

> changing the encoding, but the message simply changes
> from one kind of jibberish to another!  I expect my

It isn't an encoding problem, but a display problem.

> fonts are to blame, but I don't know how to change
> them in Evolution.

Probably they use the locale fontset, for English it is iso8859-1.
You need to use a Greek locale.

> 2. How do I switch keyboard layout, so that I can
> write in Greek (using 8859-7, I assume) or a mixture
> of Greek and English?

Define your keyboard so that you use the Greek keyboard; it is, as all
non-latin ones, a dual keyboard, with US QWERTY as the first layout,
so it is fine to use it for you.
But you can type only chars that are covered by your locale;
as iso-8859-1 doens't have any greek letter at all, you cannot type
Greek with that locale.


So; you need to:

- setup your locales preference to Greek
- edit the file ~/.i18n to change LANGUAGE to LANGUAGE="C"
- setup your keyboard to Greek keyboard

> Any more general pointers or references to HOWTOs on
> this subject are also welcome.

It's quite simple; in Gnome1.x you are limited for output and input
to the charset of your locale.
In Gnome2 unicode is used internally, pango is used for displaying (mening
support for all languages (as long as you have the fonts),
and the Xutf8LookupString() function is used for keyboard input (or at
least it should) meaning you can type in utf-8.
That is, Gnome2 will be independent of the locale encoding.

It is possible with Gnome1.x to use an UTF-8 locale; it will behave
as Gnome2 in regards of internal encoding and input; however for the
output it gets quite nightmarish.
The problem with Gnome1.x in utf-8 is that it uses the first matching
*-iso10646-1 font.
But those fonts are always incomplete, and you can very well end up
with a font that don't have the glyphs you need (eg: you get a font
with armenian letters but not greek letters).
The big difference in Gnome2 is that it will detect the missing glyphs
and will be able to look into other fonts for them; and also will
recognize different scritps, and use different fonts for them.

So, you can use UTF-8 for GReek & English in Gnome1.x; but you will need
to carefully fine-tune the fonts setting. 


-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://www.srtxg.easynet.be/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0x8F0E4975
[you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Italian or Portuguese]