[tlug] GTK2: Displaying Japanese font names in Romaji

[Matt Gushee <matt@example.com>]

I am having a problem with Japanese font selection in GTK applications. 
It's not an issue with accessing the fonts or rendering them ... I have 
Japanese input working fine, and Kanji in text widgets look like Kanji 
when they're supposed to. No, the problem is just mojibake in font menus.

I normally work with in an English environment with LANG=en_US.UTF-8 
(didn't specify the encoding until recently, but it doesn't seem to make 
any diff in this context). I have my GUI font set to Bitstream Vera 
Sans; obviously that doesn't include Japanese characters, but up until 
maybe a year ago the J-font names would be shown in romaji. At some 
point, I guess when I upgraded GTK, all the GTK2 apps started trying to 
show Japanese font names in kanji, with the undesirable results described.

Anyone know what, if anything, I can do about this? I suppose I could 
switch to a different font for the GUI, but every Japanese font I've 
seen has horrid-looking romaji; I'd prefer not to make all my menus ugly 
and unreadable just to be able to read the font names. Any way I can 
make GTK use the romaji font names?

TIA for any clues.

--
Matt Gushee
: Bantam - lightweight file manager : matt.gushee.net/software/bantam/ :
: RASCL's A Simple Configuration Language :     matt.gushee.net/rascl/ :