Re: tlug: Linux and Japanese

[john wood <jyonw@example.com>]

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tlug note from john wood <jyonw@example.com>
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> All you want is Japanese email with a GUI mailer?  I got the
> impression from Craig's mail that you were looking for a general
> solution for *all* apps.
well, id like that too.. :) heh.. who wouldn't?  But what I really
want its a Japanese interface to
1) Some kind of word processor (JVIM is fine, but a GUI one
would be even better)
2) Email (read and write in Elm or another GUI editor)

I already have nutscrape navigator working so that is no problem...

> Both Elm and Pine used to need Japanese patches for bullet proof
> operation.  I have wedged both by reading or writing Japanese.  There
> is definitely a set of patches for Elm as of about two years ago, I
> don't know if Pine has a Japanese version.  Both work OK nearly 100%
> of the time, and maybe recent versions will get to 100% (I haven't
> used either for a couple of years).  Also, both violate Internet
> standards when used this way (more later).

Well Im not a fan of Pine (the menus drive me nuts) so I would love
to use Elm for Japanese (and all the rest) of my mail.. I tried to get
that small little Xelm to compile but it wouldnt go.. that would be
even better :)

> In fact, a lot of them were written by Japanese, specifically with
> Japanese Usenet and email in mind.  I can't recommend any, but there
> are several in the X11R5 contrib section.  I don't know the X11R6
> contrib section very well, but many have probably been updated.  There 
> are also some GUI editors there.

just exactly where? do you know the names of the sites etc?

> Not exactly.  If you want to comply with Internet standards for mail,
> you need a mailer that knows about Japanese.  At a minimum it should
> do quoted-printable encoding on Japanese in headers.  If there is raw
> Japanese in the headers, there is no telling what some mail transport
> systems will do to it.  They are requested to leave it alone, and most
> do nowadays, but every once in a while it gives one a stomachache, and
> your mail disappears into the bitbucket.  Preferably it should also
> translate the message body into New-JIS.  It's *really* bad form for a
> transport to munge your message body, and that's very rare.  But some
> do....  Mostly, you won't have a problem.  Man-ga-ichi....  It's best
> to comply with standards.
> Of course, if you don't plan to use any Japanese in headers you're OK.
> However, a Japanese-aware mailer can do things like setting the MIME
> content-type and so on, which allows smart programs on the receiving
> side to do spiffy stuff with messages.  Pine will allow you to set the 
> content-type as an option, but it's dumb about it.  The mail is either 
> US-ASCII, or it's whatever you configure as your alternate character
> set.  Not all mailers go even that far.

is there some kind of daemon that can run on your localhost that 
reads all the mail coming in and turns it into encoding that can be
read/edited in say patched-elm? the as it goes out, change it to 
whatever the "industry" standard is (S-JIS right?)

> If you insist on your choice of mailer, you're going to need XIM, and
> even then, few mailers will support it.  An alternative path would
> be to check out contributed software that supports Japanese via the
> kinput or kinput2 protocols.  While these are not standard nor
> flexible to non-Japanese environments, they work now, which as far as
> I can tell XIM doesn't.

any ideas where I can pickup XIM?

> Xedit evidently supports internationalized fontsets.  I can't convince
> it to find Japanese fonts; my C locale support may be the problem.  It
> complains about "missing charsets in String to Fontset conversion."
> Since I know the fonts are there, I suspect that the problem is that
> my locale files don't specify the charsets that are needed.  Maybe
> that will help find the problem....  OTOH, I couldn't find any
> evidence that Xedit supports internationalized input.  Are you sure
> you were typing Japanese into Xedit?  Or just displaying it?
both.. im Sure!

> If you actually were typing Japanese into Xedit, then maybe you've got 
> an FEP running in the background that steals the keystrokes and remaps 
> them.  If so, that might explain why jvim is behaving strangely,
> nothing to do with kterm after all.
like what?? i didn't think there was one (kinput2?). if there is I cannot
switch modes into Japanese or whatever when im using Xedit.. i think we
edited something in the Xedit defaults..

> Or maybe its easier to switch to Emacs/Mule....  The menuing in recent 
> versions of Emacs is much better than it used to be.  Under X, it's
> almost GUI :-)
nonoooooooononono... i really really don't want to fool with Emacs/Mule...
but if thats the last alternative.. :)

Thanks
	John

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