Chapter 13. Examples of I18N

105

At first I explore the source code to find the way for characters to be displayed. I found that it

implements a 'ncurses' like functions.

Since Minicom is used for BBS it seemed to have a conversion table so as to IBM PC graphics

characters (I guess) can be displayed correctly. I made an another pass for characters to go without

any modification and added a new command option to activate the pass.

13.2.2 Not to break continuity of multibyte characters

The 'ncurses' like functions in Minicom outputs location code every time a character is outputted.

This breaks continuity of multibyte characters.

13.2.3 Catalog in EUC JP and SHIFT JIS

13.3 user ja   two sets of messages in ASCII and native codeset in the

same language

The author of this section is Tomohiro KUBOTA (

).

13.3.1 Introduction

user ja

is a Debian specific software which establishes basic settings for Japanese speaking be 

ginners.

user ja

does not automatically establishes the settings. A user who needs Japanese

environment has to invoke

user ja conf

.

Since

user ja conf

is a software to establish Japanese environment, the environment where

user ja runs may be poor Japanese environment. For example,

user ja conf

must not assume

that Japanese character can be displayed. However, Japanese character should be used in envi 

ronments where it is possible.

user ja

is a simple example which switches two sets of messages, one is written using ASCII

characters and the other Japanese characters. Note that both of them are written in Japanese

language. This is beyond what gettext can do.

Though

user ja

is a Japanese specific software, this problem of ability to display non ASCII

character is common to non ASCII languages.

13.3.2 Strategy

The following environments can display Japanese characters:

kon

(Kanji Console),

kterm

, and

krxvt

(in

rxvt ml

package). And more, telnet softwares for Windows and so on may be able to