[kde-linux] Problems with some Chinese characters

[James Richard Tyrer]

Ed Greshko wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> In konsole and other kde applications some problems with certain Chinese
> characters seems to have crept in when running with LANG=en_US.UTF-8.
> 
> Using 钉 as an example...
> 
> In konsole on RHELv4 (konsole 1.4.1) 钉 can only be displayed when the
> Large or Huge fonts are selected or if certain custom fonts/sizes are
> selected.  Not ideal...but workable.
> 
> In konsole of Fedora C5 I could not find any combination of settings,
> short of changing my LANG settings, to display 钉 and other characters.
> 
> The same holds true for the konsole supplied in SuSE 10.  I can't boot
> that system at the moment so I don't know the versions.
> 
> Does anyone know what the problems are?  Are they distribution related
> or....?
> 
> FWIW, the application "mlterm" (multilingual terminal) works find under
> KDE as well as gnome-terminal under both gnome and KDE.

Konsole needs some work in this regard (UniCode) even though Qt supports 
UniCode.  There is also a small bug in Qt that it will not search other 
fonts if a character isn't in the current font.  This is fixed in Qt-4 
(IIUC) but will never be fixed in Qt-3.  So, a necessary condition is 
that you use a font that contains the UniCode characters which you want 
to use.  I confirmed that Courier New contains the glyph in question and 
started Konsole with LANG=en_US.UTF-8 and paste didn't work although it 
works fine in KWrite.  So, I conclude that this is a bug in Konsole -- 
poor UTF-8 support.  Please check the bug database and report it if it 
isn't there.

I can't get this to work with gnome-terminal but I don't have the Locale 
support in my C library.  So, make sure that you do have the support for 
that locale.

-- 
JRT