international fonts and character encodings

[James Richard Tyrer]

Christopher Marshall wrote:
> I am trying to use KDE with farsi fonts and characters.  I am using KDE 3.1.
> 
> I've had some luck with kwrite and I am wondering how to get other KDE applications to let me type
> in farsi and have the characters displayed correctly.
> 
> Here's what I've done / figured out so far.
> 
> I installed the kde farsi i18n package and went to the control center->regional &
> accessibility->keyboard layout section and enabled the farsi keymap as an additional keymap I can
> choose at the application level.
> 
> I now have an American flag (close to the clock in the lower right hand corner of the screen)
> which changes to an Iranian flag when I click on it.
> 
> If I am in kwrite, and I toggle the keyboard to farsi and start typing, all I get are boxes for
> characters, which I take to be place holders for missing fonts.
> 
> It seems that kwrite lets you set the character encoding explicitly to utf16, utf8, and quite a
> few other choices as well.  By setting the character encoding to utf16 and looking at a hex dump
> of the output, I can tell that the farsi keyboard layout is working because characters in the 0600
> to 06ff range (the unicode range reserved for Arabic characters) are being put in the document
> when I type.
> 
> The characters I type, though, are written left to right in kwrite and not right to left.  Is
> there a way to fix that?
> 
> Can anyone advise me on how to get farsi the correct farsi/arabic fonts recognized in KDE?

I believe that your only problem is the lack of a font.

Basil's suggestion isn't going to help since there are no normal fonts with 
ISO8859-6 (Farsi).  What this means is that you are probably going to have 
to use a UniCode font.  You can use the same 'grep' but look for: 
"10646-1".  However, this doesn't mean that the font will work since 
UniCode fonts don't always have all glyphs.

I tried this and if I select the Iranian keyboard layout and type in 
KWrite, I get something that looks like Arabic but it it is slightly 
different -- I hope that it is Farsi script.

Perhaps there is some help here:

	http://www.farsikde.org/

My fonts HOWTO is in need of a major rewrite, but it is available at:

	http://home.earthlink.net/~tyrerj/files/Fonts Mini HOWTO.txt

I would try installing the MS-TrueType fonts:

	http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/

--
JRT

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