Default fonts in Slack not UTF-8 compatible?
 

Well the subject says it all.. Am i doing something wrong, or are the default fonts that come with slackware not UTF-8 compatible?

I used to read alot of languages before the clean install.. But now, i can't read arabic, chinese, japanese, german, hebrew, (the list might be long, but i stopped here). All i see are the typical boxes with HEX in them.

The fonts i have installed are,
x11-fonts-misc
x11-fonts-scale,

and my xorg looks like so Don't know if they all exist or are full though... (should i?)

Are these the only fonts i have, which X and all other X related apps use? Are they TTF? And are there any better looking ones that are TTF and UTF-8/16 compatible?

Cheers

I had to install fonts on both my desktop and my laptop in order to be able to display/input Japanese.

I can understand that for Japanese, but what about German, Arabic and Hebrew?

Shouldn't any font do the trick if it supports UTF-8 ?

Arabic and Hebrew were fixed with the same font I installed for Japanese. No problem with German, however; it worked out of the box. (German characters are in ASCII)

Don't mix "not the default" with "not working".

The fact is:

Only very few Linux distributions are Unicode based, in toto. One of the most advanced distributions in this respect is SuSE 9.3. The basic system is UTF-8, completely. But: Some programs that come with it, are not. Eg, the console based browser links supports a lot of ISO encodings, but not UTF-8. Result: German umlauts aren't displayed. Other programs show combinations of ugly replacement characters instead. Both results are incorrect.

Slackware is maintained more conservatively. Encoding is just one example showing that this is an advantage. Display of special characters in Slackware is consistent over all applications in Slackware.

But don't be disappointed:

For German you don't need UTF-8. Use ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-15. The latter ist good enough for most European languages plus Turkish.

However, if you want to see correct Japanese on your screen, you may be in need of Unicode, anyway....

gargamel

Thanks gargamel. Unfortunately, with the work i'm doing, i must stick with UTF-8.

As for the system, well, i'm not that concerned with the base itself, but rather more on Xorg, and particularely firefox and other text editors out there that (i'm assuming) all use the same font files located somewhere in /etc/X11.

Ok, then nothing I said is of any help to you, unfortunately.
You will have to go through the pain of acquiring the right fonts and install them in the rigth locations on your system, I am afraid. It's possible, though.

If you use KDE, there's a module in the control centre for managing fonts. It's really helpful.

gargamel

Hehe, thanks anyway =)

Hmm, i might switch to KDE to do that and then back to XFce if the changes are global.

But the question is, which fonts do i go for ..

You might try some -- believe it or not -- Microsoft TrueType fonts, first. You can download them from various places, just not from Microsoft, anymore. One place is KDE.org (sorry, I forgot where precisely, but it's easy to find when you look at the navigation bar on the left).

I am not sure if these are what you need for your current problem, I have to admit. But they may be useful for you if you exchange documents with Windows users.

Eg, I create OpenOffice.org documents on Windows and Linux (Slackware and SuSE). Only by sticking to these fonts that are available for all major platforms the documents look the same everywhere.

Good luck!

gargamel

Just found this link in another thread:

http://killerbob.ca/howto/

HTH. gargamel.