On Thu, 14 Dec 2000, Guy Hoffman wrote:
>
> I tried to find something on the mailing list, but to no avail...so, at the
> risk of sounding stupid:
>
> I am trying to install hebrew support to my RH6.2/KDE2.0 configuration.
>
> But, running ./configure and make all on the unzipped kde-i18n-he package
> seems to not do anything at all. it usually just reports "nothing to be done
> for <x>". And after that, Hebrew is not an option in the Language selector.
>
> What am I doing wrong?
I haven't downloaded the tarball, only the binary RPM, so I can only
guess. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I assume kde is installed under /usr in your machine. If it is installed
anywhere else (under /opt/kde or under /usr/local) - fix pathes
accordingly.
Generally all this does is installing a bounch of files (.mo) under
/usr/share/locale/he/LC_MESSAGES/
This means that whenever you will use any of those programs, and you
locale (see locale (7)) settings will be set to "he" (spesifically:
LC_MESSAGES), those "cataogs" will be used to replace strings in the
original binaries.
There is one thing you should do _before_ adding the hebrew support: The
translation of KDE2 uses iso10646-1 encoding. You need to get fonts with
such encoding, and then tell kde to use them:
http://www.kde.org/il/hebrew/ (section 3). Note that ttmkfdir-heb is
reported t work flawlessly with RH6.x's fonts server.
In addition, if you have already installed XFree4.0, you can use the font
"fixed" with the encoding iso10646-1. If you use the appropriate sizes
(e.g. 13 and 14) you would get a somewhat reasonable result. Not as good
as Arial, but much more readable than question marks.
(TODO: make those fonts availble seperately)
You can set the messages language explicitly in KDE, as explained in
http://www.kde.org/il/hebrew/ :
Preferences -> Personalization -> Country & Language
Asia & Oceania -> Israel
However, you can leave it as "default", and simply set in your
environment:
LANG=he
if you use bash, you can add something like:
LANG=he
export LANG
to your .bash_profile or /etc/profile .
To verify that it is indeed set properly, run:
locale
and see that you get (among others):
LC_MESSAGES=he
LC_CTYPE=he
LC_ALL=
LC_MESSAGES is for user interfaces of programs, LC_CTYPE is also used b
X when inputing characters. Without setting this, many programs won't
accept hebrew characters.
<side_note>
One question I have: when I set the messages language explicitly through
the KDE interface ("language" in KDE jargon) can I still override this
with LANG and LC_* environment vars?
i.e.: if I set the KDE language to "Israeli" and then run:
konsole --help
I should see a gibrish message (if I run this from konsole itself, I will
see the help message as question marks). Does:
env LC_ALL=C konsole --help
produce a decent english help message?
(BTW: I consider this behaviour a bug, not a feature. The help message
should not be translated to hebrew, IMHO, because there is too big a
chance it will be displayed as gibrish. But as I said before, I'm not a
KDE2 user)
</side_note>
If the answer to my question is negative, then you should probably avoid
setting the language through kde, and set it through the eenvironment.
This will make it much easier to selectively override hebrew user
interface for several apps.
A quick-and-dirty method of avoiding the hebrew translation after you
installed it(say: you suddenly realised you don't have iso10646-1 fonts
with hebrew glyphs, and all the newly run kde apps have '?' instead of
characters) is to rename /usr/share/locale/he/LC_MESSAGES tomporarily. It
should cause no damage (_don't_ rename the whole /usr/share/locale/he or
anything further up the tree!). Alternatively simply delete all the files
(I simply uninstalled that rpm, and installed it later, the next time I
thought I finaly figured how to install iso10646-1 fonts ;-))
(and I still think WindowMaker is better ;-)
Regards
--
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir
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