Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

baslinux - Re: [BL] Russian in BL3 - help needed for X

baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Baslinux mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] Russian in BL3 - help needed for X
  • Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:55:15 +0000 (UTC)


I am setting up a 300MHz computer with 96MB RAM and BL3 for a recent
Russian immigrant who wants to do email (in English - fastmail account
with any browser), read Russian news with some browser. And xfreecell so
she can play solitaire. No need to write Russian, just read it. Her
daughter thought she would need MS wordprocessor to write email, which
implies that she is used to Windows but I am going to try her with linux
first since I hate Windows and it runs much much slower.
Free dialup internet.

links2 graphical works in Russian with Russian console font added first.


Links2 graphical also works WITHOUT changing the console font or the X font - apparently Cyrillic is built in. (There is no code setting, and the Language setting in links affects only the menus). I tested with delilinux links2 in BL2 X, and with links2 that I compiled in svgalib mode. This is by far the simplest route. You can turn off images to save memory and download time and still view Russian in Cyrillic (http://pravda.ru).


To view Russian Cyrillic in X or console mode with nongraphical links1 or links2 you must first load a Cyrillic font and then in SETUP change Code to KOI8-R (save the change).


In X start them from an rxvt that was loaded with a Cyrillic font (I could
edit the jwm menu, but I tested by starting another rxvt from the original one - rxvt -fn cyr).

I added one 6x13 Cyrillic font to the X misc fonts (and edited fonts.dir and fonts.alias to match). Choose a font size appropriate to your resolution.


To view Russian with links1 or links2 in console mode setfont and then
choose Code KOI8-R.

You need three files from kbd.tgz

/usr/bin/setfont
/usr/lib/kbd/consolefonts/u - the unicode mapping
/usr/lib/kbd/consolefonts/Cyr_a8x16.gz

setfont Cyr_a8x16 -u /usr/lib/kbd/consolefonts/u
The mapping is wrong without this last part.

(If you add it, showfont will confirm that you have the font loaded)

This is koi8-r - Russian Cyrillic only - in which lower-case characters
are interrupted by box characters and followed by math symbols.
Other Cyrillic charsets are cp866 (used by DOS, keeps the Cyrillic
characters together), iso-8859-5 (also works with other Slavic languages),
and the Windows CP set. There are modified koi8-u for Ukrainian.
This font worked at pravda.ru with links2, even though I had to set lynx
to cp866 to display the page properly. Links2 can apparently convert
automatically.

Links2 has built-in fonts so the console font is irrelevant.
It works at pravda.ru but will not view the Russian html readme or text which are coded cp866 and came with the Russian fonts package.
Lynx works at pravda.ru if you set to cp866.

There are other koi8 and koi8r and u fonts in kbd.tgz but I must have
preferred the looks of this one.
The 'u' vowel is wrong in all of these.

The Languages listed in Setup are all European or Slavic. Links2 may include only two char sets, Latin (with assorted diacritics) and Cyrillic.

Serbian (Cyrillic or Latin) and Macedonian appear correctly. So does Polish, Albanian, French, German and Portuguese and even Greek.

A Turkish site did not display in links2 -g with the proper diacritics but the menu uses them. I think Turkish uses a different iso-8859-n than the rest of Europe.

Links2 does not do Chinese or Japanese (I see asterisks instead).

Links2 svgalib segfaults frequently. It should behave better in X.

The Cyrillic fonts come with detailed instructions - I can try installing the whole set of them in case Opera needs them all (unlike text-based programs where one font is enough). Or let the user read Russian in links and use Opera in English.

Sindi




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page