Re: CJK(Chinese, Japanesse and Korean) support in shell.

[Ryan King <rking@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[This post is me doing my best Strunk ("If you don't know how to say a
word, say it loud!" x 2), so please correct my ignorances and augment my
half-truths]

On Mon, Oct 31, 2005 at 10:54:18AM +0800, Mat wrote:
>     I have currently made a mini bootable linux of mine which includes linux
>     kernel 2.6.11(UTF8 and the 4 code pages for CJK enabled)

I think all of that enableage only affects the console interface.  By the
time you're in X, you're in a different world.

>     an NCURSES based application.

That's going to potentially be a problem - there are two ncurses libs -
ncurses and ncursesw.  The second one has "wide" char support - which is
meant in the physical sense of "wide" (as opposed to the "wide byte"
meaning).  If you don't have ncursesw in use, and you try to draw a rectangle
around some double-wide chinese char, ncurses will miscompute the width of
the rectangle.

To chech to see if any particular app is linked against the right one, just
do an `ldd /usr/bin/foo`.

If it's not linked against ncursesw, check ./configure for such an option,
or munch on the Makefile a bit.

>     I would like to display string resources which are CJK on my shell or the
>     NCURSES interface.

You'll need:
- a terminal that doesn't chork when it sees UTF-8 (properly compiled
  xterms are good for this, these days)
- fonts that cover all the code points for the characters you want to
  display.  This can be tricky.  Check out:
  http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/unicode/fontguide/

>     What steps do i have to perform to make this CJK display possible. I am
>     using the stripped down version of bash which is ash(available in busybox).

I don't have handy access to ash at the moment, but bash does a great job
with UTF-8 characters that I've seen.  Really, the shell doesn't have to
have a whole lot of smarts to display this stuff well - the only piece I
can think of that fails (e.g. in my favorite shell, zsh) is the
command-line editor.

HTHALB,
-rjk

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