Re: tlug: English/Nihongo linux configuration recommendations

[Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com>]

On Mon, 16 Nov 1998, Rex Walters wrote:

> These are the apps I plan to give my wife to use:

>     Editor:	pico (Japanified version from TL source rpm for pine)

If she's use to the graphicalness of Windows, she might like the Xemacs
package from TL better than Pico (so now you can guess what my favorite editor
is, too :-)   ).  I really find Xemacs to be nicely-featured and the Japanese
support works quite well.

>     Mailer:	pine from TL or mutt (probably the latter)

Don't know mutt so no comment, but the Pine in TL works well.  Also, Chris
Sekiya has been working on a Japanese patch for Pine 4.05, which should offer
some nice features beyond 3.96.  I'm not sure what the current status of his
patch is.

>     Browser:	muriyari netscape from TL (Ye Gods! Is there nothing better?)

Unfortunately, no :-(   Way back when (must have been the February or April
meeting, I think), when Tague came from Netscape's i18n section, one of the
things people were interested in was i18n/Japanese input for Netscape.  That
was a long time ago, but they don't seem to have done anything about it yet.
This might be something we need to ask about.  I have to wonder if maybe
Netscape is kind of forgetting about languages other than English for Linux.
But I'm getting to close to the advocacy border, so I'm not going to go there
right now :-)

> I believe I also need to install the following infrastructure tools:
> 
>     VFlib
>     Freetype library (for truetype in magicpoint -- okay this is for me :-)
>     Canna
>     Jserver
>     Kinput2

The TL packages will be your fastest route again, probably.  The upcoming TL
3.0-J (due in December, I think) support TrueType, so you can grab the
packages for that as well, or build your own.

> 1) What do people recommend for displaying Kanji truetype fonts (Ryobi)
>    in X?  How does TL do it?

Up until now, the truetype fonts in TL have only been printer fonts.
In 3.0, they will also support TrueType display fonts.  Grab the TL packages.
I'm not sure if these need to be Japanized or not.  If not, I think the 3.0-E
stuff is already on the FTP server.

> 5) Am I completely insane for attempting this?

I guess that depends on how adventurous your wife is with computers :-)  If we
see your picture on a milk carton, we'll know the answer was "yes" :-)

Jonathan


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