Kaixo! On Fri, Feb 18, 2005 at 04:36:21AM -0800, Elvis Presley wrote:
> I just found a little file on the Fedora called '/etc/sysconfig/i18n' which > contains what appear to be environment variables setting the locale. > That would explain why nobody is using .profile anymore. The ~/.profile is not machine-friendly, that is, it is not easy to have a graphic user interface where you can choose in menus the language settind and have the ~/.profile modified in a way that doesn't harm other stuff that may be there, that is why distributors prefer to define those things differently (also for the same reason there isn't anymore a big /etc/profile but instead an /etc/profile.d/ directory with small scripts inside). You can of course still manually edit your ~/.profile but you should do that only for things that cannot be configured trough a standard configuration method of your distribution. > The installation procedures need to set up this file correctly... That should be the case. Did you asked for Greek language during the install? There are some 90 languages in a standard glibc (and always increasing), distributions don't install all languages by default but let you choose which ones you want; if you don't ask for Greek then you can't expect to have good Greek support. > My next step is figuring out how the fonts work... Nowadays that's the easiest: just install them and it will work (for modern toolkits like gtk2 and qt) > The Fedora installs like a > dream, but the fonts are all ugly. Maybe the fact you didn't select Greek support means no greek font were installed, and you are stuck with the default bitmap ones from X11; and yes, bitmap fonts are ugly. Install any ttf font with greek letters and you will see a big improvement. >> type Ctrl-Alt-K (nor anything with latin letters) when the greek layout >> has been loaded that way. > > I naturally made the assumption that the 'K' was the name of the key, not a > letter in the character set. For latin it's the same. For other scripts it's different, eg the keysym for greek kappa is 'Greek_kappa'. > The keyboard extention (or X itself?) should be > translating keyboard events into actions (eg "switch to next map"). yes, but it seems KDE doesn't ask X11 to handle that (X11 doesn't have Ctrl-Alt-K in its list of keyboard switch/toggles) but instead interpret it itself then loads the next map, and only that one. so, once you load the greek one, there isn't anymore any key named "K" (there is a "Greek_kappa", but that is not the same) That problem has been reported some times in KDE bug tracking system about cyrillic keyboards (but it is not limited to cyrillic, any keyboard layout withou a "K" keysym is in the case, that is, any non latin one: cyrillic, greek, armenian, georgian, arabic, hebrew,...) > Now, what about "input methods?" That depends of each input method. > I read somewhere, these seem to be separate processes yes. > which provide visual feedback while the character is being composed. no. they *can* do that (and most do) but it isn't an obligation, there may be input methods that don't provide visual feedback until the full sequence is done (it's probably not common, but it may exist; I've actually seen some cases already, even if those could be considered more as bugs than anything else) > I like Yudit, because it puts down the character representation of > the compose key (like the ';', the greek accent key) before I press > the vowell. an input method is not needed for such a simple thing; input methods are usefull for more complex needs, usually for languages that need a number of characters exceeding the total of keys available on a keyboard (like Chinese) and for transliterations (you type in a given script and the input method converts to another, eg you type in latin and it converts to cyrillic, handling some streams of letters in a special way so that for example "sh" gives not cyrillic-s (Ñ) and cirillic-h (Ñ) but cyrillic-sh (Ñ) instead). > [The only problem with an input method as an application process is that the > kernel would have to perform a context switch on each keyboard event. This > seems ridiculously time consuming.] (believe me, you don't type that fast that it could ever be an issue) > Does it make sense to use an IM for Greek? For modern greek no (particularly if you have nice keyboard with the greek letters engraved in the keys, as is probably the case of those sold in Greece). For ancient polytonic greek (with breaths and subscript iota and those things) it may be usefull. -- Ki Ãa vos vÃye bÃn, Pablo Saratxaga http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/ PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466 [you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto] [min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]
pgpnIABOr9fdk.pgp
Description: PGP signature
