Re: gtk with zh_TW.Big5

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

mg@plum.de writes:

> Hi,
>    I got some trouble with the zh_TW.Big5 language setting.
> 
> I got the zh_TW.Big5 Patch from gtk.org, and installed it. 
> Now I set LC_ALL to zh_TW.Big5 and parts of GTK are translated.
> But it still uses ISO-8859-1 encoding, so that you only see some
> garbage text.
> 
> (I'm using some updated redhat 5.2 english system, intel platfrom,
> XFree 3.3.3.1)

The problem is most likely that you don't have locale information
on your system for a zh locale. You probably get a message
when you start GTK+ about "locale not supported by C library".

The problem here is basically that glibc-2.0 has no support
for 16-bit locales.

I'm not sure what the best way of working around the problem
is. For Japanese and Korean locales, there are some established
packages that work around the deficiency, but I don't know
if there are equivalent packages for the Chinese locales.

glibc-2.1 (now appearing in various Liunux distributions) improves
the situation a bit - in that it can handle 16-bit
character sets. It still doesn't include the necessary
locale files (and can't really handle the correct locale
definitions), but the hacks to get glibc-2.1 working with
16-bit locales are simpler than those for glibc-2.0.

If you interested in tackling doing thing this for big5,
let me know and I can point you in the direction of some
examples for other locales.
 
> I edited my .gtkrc and added the following :
> 
> style "Chinese"
> {
>  
> fontset="-dynalab-ming-medium-r-normal-*-24-*-*-*-*-*-big5-0,-adobe-times-medium-r-normal--14-*-*-*-*-*-*-*"
> 
> }
> 
> widget_class "*" style "Chinese"
> 
> When I start testgtk now, it runs noteably slower (-> the font gets
> loaded, its about 1 mb gziped), but there is still garbage on the
> dialogs.
> 
> from the zh_TW.Big5.po :
> "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=big5\n"
> 
> I did install a X11 locale from some .tw server :
> 
> ls -l /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/zh_TW.Big5/
> total 2
> -rw-r--r--   1 root     root         1163 Feb 18 10:08 XLC_LOCALE
> 
> But that did not help, either.

That would only help if your X libraries (and all the
relevelant applications) were compiled wiht
-D_X_LOCALE which says to use the locale routines for X
instead of the locale routines from glibc. However, the
X libraries that Red Hat ships are not compiled this
way.

Regards,
                                        Owen