Japanese chars in File Names

Dankles · 01-02-2009, 06:38 PM

Is there a way to show japanese characters of my files in the console and my file manager?
Dunno if this is relevent but here some of my language settings:

Code:

LANG=en_US
LC_COLLATE=C

Do I need unicode? Japanese Fonts will work in Firefox and other apps(besides my file manager=pcmanfm)

David the H. · 01-02-2009, 07:33 PM

Yes, you generally need to use UTF-8, or at least a Japanese encoding. But if you require any kind of international language support, then unicode is the way to go, because it can handle all characters. It's the wave of the future. I started on Linux before unicode support was complete, and Japanese support was a b***, let me tell you.

But let me also advise you from personal experience that it's easier if you just use alphanumeric characters in filenames. Things like file globbing and sorting are much more complicated with Japanese, and I still haven't figured out how to do Japanese input on a non-gui terminal yet. I always simply romanize my Japanese filenames now.

This is the best page I've found concerning international text support. It's debian-focused, but most of the info is distro-agnostic.

Web page displays depend only on the browser's rendering engine and font availability. They have nothing to do with the system encoding.

Alien Bob · 01-02-2009, 07:53 PM

Enabling UTF-8 locale is only part of what you need to do. It will enable you to display Japanese text in your console and in X terminals. If that is all you need, editing /etc/profile.d/lang.sh and enabling a UTF-8 locale is enough. But in order to input Japanese text you need to do a little more.

You will find the following piece of text in the CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT file of Slackware 12.1 ... unfortunately it was deleted from the 12.2 version:

Code:

Input methods for complex characters (CJK, which is shorthand for Chinese,
  Japanese, Korean) and other non-latin character sets have been added. These
  input methods use the SCIM (Smart Common Input Method) platform.
  The environment variables for SCIM support are set in /etc/profile.d/scim.sh
  The requirements for getting SCIM input methods to work in your X session
  are as follows:
  (1) Use a UTF-8 locale. Look in /etc/profile.d/lang.sh for setting your
      language to (for instance) en_US.UTF-8. As a word of warning: maybe you
      should leave root with a non-UTF-8 locale because you don't want root's
      commands to be misinterpreted. You can add the following line to your
      ~/.profile file to enable UTF-8 just for yourself:
        export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
  (2) Make the scim profile scripts executable. These will setup your
      environment correctly for the use of scim with X applications. Run:
        chmod +x /etc/profile.d/scim.*
  (3) Start the scim daemon as soon as your X session starts. The scim daemon
      must be active before any of your X applications. In KDE, you can add a
      shell script to the ~/.kde/Autostart folder that runs the command
      "scim -d". In XFCE you can add "scim -d" to the Autostarted Applications.
      If you boot your computer in runlevel 4 (the graphical XDM/KDM login)
      you can simply add the line "scim -d" to your ~/.xprofile file.
      This gives you a Desktop Environment independent way of starting scim.
  When scim is running, you will see a small keyboard icon in your system tray.
  Right-click it to enter SCIM Setup. In 'Global Setup' select your keyboard
  layout, and you are ready to start entering just about any language
  characters you wish! Press the magical key combo <Control><Space>
  in order to activate or deactivate SCIM input. The SCIM taskbar in the
  desktop's corner allows you to select a language. As you type, SCIM will show
  an overview of applicable character glyphs (if you are inputting complex
  characters like Japanese).

Hope this helps.

Eric