Re: alternative alphabets

[Charles Menzes <charles@lunarmedia.net>]

The instructions seem, pretty straightforward, but I'm just not catching 
on too quickly. Sure enough 'echo $LANG' does show that I have en_US set 
for language variable (i am running redhat 7.1 on console). In 
/usr/lib/locale I found ru_RU as well as what seems to be a couple 
different variations.
I tried doing an 'export LANG="ru_RU"' and then re-running vi, but nothing 
seems to have changed regarding how my text is being diplayed. 

Am I missing a step, or is it possible that I am maybe setting the 
variable to an incorrect variable? The only cyrillic rpm that i see on 
redhat's website is XFree86-cyrillic-fonts-4.0.3-5.i386.rpm which 
certainly looks as though its more geared towards X11 rather than console.

I did a quick 'rpm -qa | grep ISO' and it returned empty, so perhaps I am 
missing some font files?

-c




On 16 Mar 2002, Jeff Licquia wrote:

> On Sat, 2002-03-16 at 21:42, Charles Menzes wrote:
> > i recently received a text file written in the cyrillic alphabet. when 
> > opening it under vi, i am unable to see the actual characters. is there an 
> > easy way to build this support in?
> 
> It's already there - or, at least, it is if you're using most popular
> distributions.  (Are there any distributions that don't do i18n?)
> 
> What you need to do:
> 
>  - Install your distro's font packages for Cyrillic (sometimes labeled
> "Russian fonts").  Be sure you get the right font packages for console
> or X11, depending on what environment you're in.  (It's easier to get
> X11 working than console.)
> 
>  - Set the LANG environment variable to the proper locale.
> 
>  - Run vi again on the file.
> 
> Locale settings use the two-letter ISO language and country codes, with
> optional encoding rules.  They look like this:
> 
>   lang_COUNTRY.ENCODING
> 
> So, for example, most of us use:
> 
>   en_US.ISO-8859-1
> 
> Elements can be assumed and left off, so you can say:
> 
>   en_US
> 
> or even:
> 
>   en
> 
> (though some programs might see the latter and spell things like
> "civilized" as "civilised").
> 
> As a bonus for being an English speaker, just about all encodings are
> structured as supersets of ASCII, so your plain English text should work
> in all languages and encodings.  If you set the language to something
> different than English, though, vi might start speaking Russian or
> whatever to you in its own messages.
> 
> So, to continue to get English text but with support for Russian
> characters, you'd likely need:
> 
>   en_US.ISO-8859-5
> 
> Ultimately, we all want to switch to Unicode someday.  In that case, the
> encoding would look like:
> 
>   en_US.UTF-8
> 
> And you'd be able to see those Russian characters without playing all
> these games, as well as Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, and Esperanto - all
> in one document, even, if one wants.  The Linux world isn't quite ready
> for Unicode yet, though we're getting there very rapidly.
> 
> If you want more information, the locale stuff is part of glibc, and is
> often installed as a "locales" package if it isn't part of the libc
> package proper.  The API for doing a lot of this from the program's
> point of view is called "gettext".  If you're really interested in
> playing with this stuff, there's a conversion program called "iconv"
> which can convert between various ISO encodings, ASCII, and Unicode.
> 
> 
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