Archaic wrote: > On Wed, Apr 06, 2005 at 08:49:17AM +0600, Alexander E. Patrakov wrote: > <..> > > Alexander, thanks for all the input. As a native english speaker who > only *occasionally* has need to write in Greek, I haven't spent much > time investigating it and instead just use a TTF font that is encoded in > 8859-1 and has a few microsoft symbols in it.
There is no such thing. Almost all TTF fonts are Unicode fonts (but there may be missing glyphs), and the FreeType2 library understands only Unicode and requires all apps to convert between the locale encoding and Unicode on their own. Calling the mbrtowcs function from glibc or a similar one is sufficient. > I would like to get away > from reliance on openoffice and would like to expand into UTF-8 so I > could eventually write Greek text docs or html in vim instead. > > Not having much free time, could you suggest some docs to get me > started? > > (X-posted to lfs-chat. Please reply there.) First check if Linux UTF-8 support is ready enough for you. Install RedHat Enterprise Linux or SLES, they claim full UTF-8 support out of the box - but please don't install any applications that don't come with that distro. If it works for you, fine. If not, forget about UTF-8. I cannot know your decision in advance because I noticed a strange (for me) fact: different people cry about different things being broken. E.g, once I saw a message on this list saying that setting any locale is evil because it breaks some mail client I never used. For me, it was just always buggy (because I always have to set up the locale to get case-insensitive searches and outgoing mail headers correct) and I (wrongly) assumed everyone to be of the same opinion and so didn't cry about that. If you really want to be able to use UTF-8 based locale, follow my UTF-8 hint. I know it's outdated, in fact the "loadkeys" script should be replaced with the updated "console" script I posted recently, and some problems no longer exist - but some were just not mentioned in the hint, e.g. you will not be able to: - record a Windows-readable CD using unpatched mkisofs and cdrecord if you use UTF-8 based locale and national characters in file names - print a hard copy of a text document from the command line without going beyond BLFS - just revert your settings if you are dissatisfied (because the "altcharset" ncurses patch is not mentioned) To actually type greek, you need to set up a greek keyboard layout by configuring your keyboard as BLFS says on http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/x/xfree86-setup.html (just replace "ru" with "el"). Or, if you want to be able to type all strange Unicode characters, install some "input method" software (like scim or uim) instead. A really bad thing is that most of guides found on the Internet assume distros, not LFS - that's why I recommend you nothing except Google. The difference is that distros, unlike LFS, patch their software. And in fact, patched versions are sometimes more widespread and more tested than the original :( Anyway: http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/unicode/ http://www.jw-stumpel.nl/stestu.html -- Alexander E. Patrakov -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
