Re: Japanese characters display

[Dave Malcolm <david davemalcolm demon co uk>]

On Fri, 2003-04-25 at 17:30, ramdhan singh wrote:
> Hi Friends,
> Can anybody suggest me some document that describes
> how to display the japanese characters in GTK??
> 
> I would be very grateful if anybody can help me in
> this.
> 
> If there is no documentaion: 
> Can anybody give clue about:
> 1. What setting need to be done in Redhat Linux 8.0
> before running the GTK application?

Displaying Kanji in GTK 2 works for me without too many problems on my
Red Hat 8 install.  I did select Japanese language support at install
time, for what it's worth.  Works for me in Mozilla as well, though
that's heading off-topic.

You might want to download a program called "gunicharmap" (I think) as well, which lets you browse the entire unicode character set.

> 2. Special functions used in GTK to handle these
> charactes?

Assuming you're running a GTK 2 application, then all text display
should go through a rather fine library called "Pango" which deals with
most of the issues.  Hopefully all the text you want to display is in
the UTF-8 encoding.

In terms of text entry, I'm not sure of the details, but you might want
to try the project im-ja on sourceforge.  Don't have the precise link to
hand.  As far as I understand it, GTK has plugin "input methods" for
different languages, and this is one for Japanese.

If anyone else has further info, I'd be grateful - I'm an English
student of the Japanese language and don't speak it well enough to
follow most native Japanese web pages on the subject.

[snip]

Dave Malcolm