thanks mark... On Mon 09 Jun 03, 1:27 PM, Mark K. Kim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > On Mon, 9 Jun 2003, Peter Jay Salzman wrote: > > > * start an xterm with a suitable font: "xterm -fn <fontname> -e vim" > > * use utf-8 encoding which uses encodes unicode and ISO10646 text. > > * load a suitable keymap to help make entering text easier. > > > > > > is all this correct so far? even in a "touchy-feely" way? i'm a > > complete newbie in this topic. > > It depends on the foreign language and how it's encoded. > > The XTerm has its own encoding and fonts (mostly designed for latin-based > languages). VIM also has its own encoding and fonts. It gets really > tricky because there are so many systems depending on each other, and you > may have to trick one or more of the systems to make the foreign language > work, but which systems you can trick depends on the foreign language > you wanna work with. > > What language are you working with? Latin-based languages only need font > change, and you can probably just change the fonts on XTerm. Multibyte > languages (ie, CJK) generally need special XTerm that understands that > language (generally using its own, non-utf-8, encoding). I won't even > touch right-to-left or up-and-down languages (that requires both terminal > and Vim support.)
right-to-left languages are really, really, really well supported in vim. at least, they seem to be. check out: :set rl all the vim commands i can think of work well. the language i'm thinking of is hebrew, but with some important issues. 1. i need vowel support. 2. i really want to have mixed hebrew/english i believe taken together, i want to use ISO 10646 which can represent all languages at the same time. > > if this is about correct, how does one tell vim to encode the text using > > utf-8? > > :set encoding=utf-8 > That tells VIM to interpret the file as though it's encoded in UTF-8. > But VIM's got no idea how the data should be displayed so I think it > attemps to display them in unicode by default. So your terminal should > also be capable of unicode and got all the necessary fonts. as a first stab at getting utf-8 capable xterms, i set: LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 but wierd things started to happen, like mutt's threading lines turned into really strange characters. i guess the applications themselves need to be utf-8 aware too. > Works great under WindowsXP (everything's in unicode; just make sure you > got the fonts installed.) that makes me very sad... :( > > and how do you tell vim "i want to use language X whose characters are > > unicode number UT-Y through UT-Z? or doesn't it work quite that way? > > I don't think the unicode characters are marked by languages. Some are > obvious (CJK, though subset of C is also used by JK), but others are less > so (punctuation, alphabets, etc.) Many characters are also not in > sequence (I think Chinese is broken up in two or more sets -- unicode is > constantly evolving and they need to maintain backwards compatibility.) okay. it never is that easy, eh? :-) it totally sucks that mixed hebrew-with-vowels/engish turned out to be such a hard thing to do. :( sucks even worse that it's easy on windows xp. :( pete -- GPG Instructions: http://www.dirac.org/linux/gpg GPG Fingerprint: B9F1 6CF3 47C4 7CD8 D33E 70A9 A3B9 1945 67EA 951D _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
