On 2016-03-17 18:20:12, Marc Espie <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 10:42:21AM -0600, Anthony J. Bentley wrote:
> > I understand that people sometimes, even frequently, need to work with
> > non-UTF encodings. But you can get that effect on OpenBSD with a UTF-8
> > locale and using iconv on incoming and outgoing data. I've been doing
> > so for Japanese and European content for over six years.
>
> I'm pretty sure you want to engage the japanese people directly over that
> issue.
>
> I remember porting that software and struggling with it back when I needed
> japanese. I have no idea what's still good or not, but it's best to let
> them decide, for the most part.
>
I'm not sure how much my opinion counts, since I'm not a native
speaker, but I'm able to use irssi, vim, mutt, and my shell of
choice (zsh) just fine with the following script (aliased to a
hotkey in CWM).
#!/bin/sh
env LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8 uim-xim &
env LC_ALL=ja_JP.UTF-8 uxterm -fa "Sazanami Gothic" -fs 16 $1
The first line launches an IME (if it's not running already), and
the second uses a bigger font, and also switches it to one I
installed from ports. It's the only font I've found so far that
can render *both* Japanese text and the Latin alphabet in a way
that's not uncomfortably ugly. All the other ones I've tried
render Japanese text just fine, but output only full-width Latin
text, which is very tiring on the eyes after a minute or two.
This allows me to both see and type Japanese text without issue
for the most part (there are some characters that end up
overlapping each other, like ○○ likely
because the terminal renders them as if they were half-width
characters when they're really full-width characters) but that's
an incredibly minor issue IMO. Compared to how tedious it was to
set things up to work with Japanese text on the terminal ~15 years
ago when I first started, this is orders of magnitude better.
I haven't had a need to install anything else from ports to
accomplish what *I* need to, but then again, I have a very
UTF-centric workflow.
If someone were working with and depended upon using a terminal
program that used ISO-2022-JP or EUC-JP and wasn't UTF-8 capable,
then having a terminal that used those codesets natively would be
a requirement.
I'd still recommend waiting until several native speakers chime in
with their workflows, since mine is probably a limited subset of
what one would encounter in a Japanese office/datacenter, but I
still thought it worth chiming in to say that at least it's
possible to work with many programs from ports with the base uxterm.
--
Bryan
