FreeBSD setup for chinese usage

[lockdoc]

Hi everybody,

as my chinese is not that good yet, i am not able to contribute too much in that way,

so I was thinking there can also be other ways.

I just finished setting up my freebsd, with chinese input (characters, and pinyin tone marks), a working qq any many more.

So if anyone of you is using this system and having trouble, just ask me.

[renzhe]

Interesting thread. Although I'm a Linux user exclusively, it would be good to know what was necessary to get things running.

It used to be quite a chore in Linux, but today everything works pretty much out of the box, you only need some fonts and an input method. I assume that it is similar with FreeBSD.

[lockdoc]

BSD Systems are still tough for the Desktop, especially, if you don't take a desktop distribution.

Btw which input are you using. I have seen there are at least 3 different ones

ibus-pinyin, fcitx and scim.

for ibus-pinyin, there is also an input, where you can write tone-marks

Some applications also seem tricky (like QQ), as they onle accept chinese input when the locale is set to chinese.

And if your whole desktop is en_US, then you have to explicitly set it for QQ (for example).

[imron]

It used to be quite a chore in Linux, but today everything works pretty much out of the box,

What about if you set your main locale and desktop language to Chinese? Do they have a decent looking font for non-Chinese text yet. This was the thing that always used to frustrate me about trying to setup a Linux box with Chinese. The font used for ascii characters was appalling if your main locale and language was Chinese.

[來撒母耳]

I'm using ubuntu 11.04 currently I'm trying to set up a completely chinese user, and my next step that I have yet to tackle is get qq working (since it seems to break on all the other messaging clients)

[lockdoc]

Do they have a decent looking font for non-Chinese text yet. This was the thing that always used to frustrate me about trying to setup a Linux box with Chinese. The font used for ascii characters was appalling if your main locale and language was Chinese.

That's the good or bad thing about Linux/BSD/etc you can make it the way you want to and customize everything.

The Font's always seem to be a problem when you come from windows. I managed to set it up so that the fonts look as sharp as on windows XP.

This was also the hardest thing to set up, because the normal fonts seem to smooth and un-sharp for me.

my next step that I have yet to tackle is get qq working (since it seems to break on all the other messaging clients)

On FreeBSD it works out of the Box, they have a qq port (in the ports collection). It runs in linux binary compatibility mode.

Unfortunately the Linux QQ Client is really sh**y. I cannot access other people's 空间 and also no webcam support. It lacks many features.

I tried a lot to setup the different windows Versions with wine. I remember I got one of them to work, but it randomly crashed.

So if anybody succeeds with a stable windows qq version in wine, please share the knowledge ;-)

[renzhe]

What about if you set your main locale and desktop language to Chinese?

I have never actually tried this, but I can't imagine that it can't be solved by a better Unicode font (like Arial Unicode or similar), or fiddling with font substitution in Qt or Pango.

If you want to use a unicode locale, the Linux setup nowadays amounts to installing some CJK fonts and SCIM, and that's it.

[imron]

The problem with font substitution is that generally it works when glyphs are missing in your default font, so it goes hunting for them in another font. The problem is that unlike many western fonts that are missing Chinese characters, all Chinese fonts have glyphs for the ascii characters and so the standard font substitution doesn't kick in. Unfortunately those standard ascii chars are butt-ugly and monospaced - which is not really great for a UI. Apparently you can also set up the font substitution so it works correctly in that sort of situation, however after mucking around for hours with fontconfigs and the like I still couldn't get any sort of acceptable result and so I gave up.

Compare this to say OS X, where I go to International Settings->Languages and then drag 简体中文 above English in the languages list, and then presto, everything switches over with nice fonts in both languages!

[renzhe]

With font-substitution, set the primary Chinese font to be something purely Latin. Then put some nice Chinese fonts lower in the substitution list. That way it will try to render everything in a Latin font, and only use Chinese fonts when it actually needs Chinese glyphs.

This is exactly how it works when you have an English unicode locale, when things are pretty

This might create a problem with punctuation marks and the like, I admit that I haven't tried it, I only ever use an English unicode locale.

[imron]

Yep, I realise that's the way to do it, but there was something about it that didn't work properly when the entire locale was in Chinese. Perhaps it was the desktop manager trying to be smart and only showing Chinese fonts to choose from when setting the default system font or something - I can't remember the specifics as it's been several years since I've tried it, I just remember it was a pain trying to get everything to work to have the main UI in Chinese but at the same time get decent looking fonts for English.