Re: Simplified Chinese in SuSE

Marc Waeckerlin <[email protected]> さんは書きました:

> Am Dienstag, 17. Mai 2005 14.21 schrieb Mike FABIAN  
>>
>> LC_CTYPE=zh_CN.UTF-8
>
> Yes, you are completely right, I forgot this. I always did 
> it before, but forgot it this time, because I always have 
> to edit /etc/sysconfig/language after installation. It 
> would be nice, if I could enter this during the 
> installation in YaST, then I would not forget it.

I wonder how the user interface should look like. This is really a
very special case, this problem occurs when you want to use Japanese
or Chinese and set your main language to something else.

This is because Japanese, simplified Chinese, and traditional Chinese
overlap in the Han region in Unicode and therefore you have to
indicate your font preferences somehow. If one of these languages is
your main language already and you do not care about the other CJ
languages, there is no problem. If you want to use all Japanese,
simplified Chinese, *and* traditional Chinese at once, you have to
carefully think about which fonts to use or it won't look nice in GTK
and glyphs will be missing in KDE.

For other languages than CJ there is no such problem because there is
no overlap in the Unicode range.

So this problem only affects CJ users who want to set their main
locale to something non-CJ. A small group probably.

Maybe one could extend the "Expert Language settings" dialog in YaST2
to edit LANG and all the LC_ variables. Currently you can only choose
whether to use UTF-8 or not and the value of ROOT_USES_LANG in that
dialog.

Just making it possible to edit all the LC_ variables in such an
expert dialog wouldn't be enough because very few people know that
LC_CTYPE affects font settings for example.

I.e. such a dialog would need a lot of explanation for each variable:
"Set this variable to achieve the following effects: bla bla ..."

Would be a complicated dialog. Do you really think this would be
useful? Or do you have a better idea?

> BTW: (off topic)
>
> 1) RC_LANG is setup as "de_DE.UTF-8", but since I live in 
> Switzerland, this should be "de_CH.UTF-8". Also, it seems 
> that "de_CH.UTF-8" is not even an official language setting 
> - why?

What do you mean by "official"? Of course you can set your locale to
de_CH.UTF-8 (by editing /etc/sysconfig/language), this locale is
supported by glibc and contained in the glibc-locale package.

You think it is not "official" just because you cannot set it easily
with YaST2?¹

> 2) Language setup: Here SuSE could definitively learn from 
> (k)ubuntu distribution: There I first choose my language 
> (German), then I get a dialog to choose my country from a 
> list of predefined Countries, for German this is Germany, 
> Austria, Switzerland, Luxemburg, Belgium and "other". This 
> way, with only two choices, all localization parameters can 
> be setup correctly, i.e. keyboard and time.

I think this would be useful, especially for Switzerland because the
keyboard is considerably different from the German keyboard.  I'll try
to talk with the YaST2 developers how much time it would need to
implement that.


Footnotes: 
¹  actually you can set it with YaST2 because you can set any
variable in /etc/sysconfig with the YaST2 sysconfig editor,
but I would not call that "easy".

-- 
Mike FABIAN   <[email protected]>   http://www.suse.de/~mfabian
睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。


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