Enabling Chinese on Linux

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He enjoys most time on Rock 'n Roll music and Linux. Loves to work with Linux fans all over the world. And spends spare time learning script languages.

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This brief article describes how to enable chinese locale on a "standard" linux box. Much of this information and more is contained in the Chinese-HOWTO. It is supplied here in order to provide the minimum information to those interested on following upcoming articles of LinuxFocus in Chinese.

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How to display Chinese characters in your Netscape Navigator

Netscape 2.0 or later supports both BIG5 and GB character codes, but we will explain the installation of the BIG5 character set only. For the time being, the LinuxFocus Chinese edition mainly supports BIG5 Chinese. Contributions from GB code s is welcome, and the following directions should be equally applicable to GB code as well.

To display Chinese in Netscape there are three steps:

Get the Chinese fonts.
Although many modern distributions of Linux include this font nevetheless you can always download BIG5 fonts from ftp://ftp.ifcss.org/pub/software/fonts/big5/bdf/ Download eb5-24k2.bdf.gz to your local directory. This file has to be prepare to installation into your X system. First convert the '.bdf' into a '.pcf' file and then compress it.
```
 
# gzip -cd eb5-24k2.bdf.gz | \
#  bdftopcf -t > eb5-24k2.pcf
# gzip eb5-24k2.pcf 
```

Install the Chinese X fonts.

# mv eb5-24k2.pcf.gz /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/
# cd /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc
# mkfontdir .

The file fonts.dir in that directory should now contain this line:

	
eb5-24k2.pcf.gz -kc-kai-medium-r-normal-fantizi-24-240-75-75-c-240-big5-0

You could create an alias for the font as well. For instance, add the following line to your fonts.alias file:

taipeik24 "-kc-kai-medium-r-normal-fantizi-24-240-75-75-c-240-big5-0"

Next, let the X Server to reload the new font by running:

# xset fp rehash

Run 'netscape', and configure 'Document Encoding' as 'Traditional Chinese'
- In Netscape 2.x or 3.x, configure it at 'Options/Document Encoding/...'
- In Netscape Communicator 4.x, use 'View/Encoding/...' instead
Select the Chinese fonts you want.
- In Netscape 2.x or 3.x, configure it at 'Options/General Preferences/Fonts'
- In Netscape Communicator 4.x, configure it at 'Edit/Preferences.../Appearance/Fonts'

The above description is, in fact, a summary from the Chinese-HOWTO. If you find any problems using Chinese fonts be sure to refer to the first.