Japanese page

XTerm


I am working on internationalization (i18n)-related improvement of XTerm, which is included in the distribution of XFree86 and is the most widely used terminal emulator on X Window System in the world.

"Locale" is a mechanism of ISO C and UNIX to consistently specify behavior of softwares which are related to languages, customs, and cultures in the world. For example, error messages should be shown in the language which "locale" specifies. There are several locale categories, each of which is related to a certain field of culture or software feature. LC_CTYPE category is one of them to specify the encoding to be used for every stream I/O. Thus, a software must output messages in ISO-8859-1 in ISO-8859-1 locale, EUC-JP in EUC-JP locale, UTF-8 in UTF-8 locale, KOI8-R in KOI8-R locale, and so on. Note that support of UTF-8 should also be implemented in the framework of locale, i.e., softwares should use UTF-8 if LC_CTYPE locale orders it. In other words, all what users who want to use UTF-8 have to do should be to set LANG variable to *.UTF-8 .

Softwares which use different encoding than the encoding which is specified by the current locale should be regarded as buggy. Thus, these my works should be regarded as bugfixes rather than improvements.

There are many properly internationalized softwares which obey LC_CTYPE locale to do any stream I/O. To work such good softwares to work well, terminal emulators have to properly display the messages which softwares send to the terminal. This is why terminal emulators have to obey LC_CTYPE locale to determine the encoding to be used.

Following works are related mainly to this point.


Old Informations


Much Older Informations

My work is based on:

To try internationalization, invoke ./configure with --enable-wide-chars.

You can use fonts of -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1 (for normalwidth characters) and -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-ja-13-120-75-75-c-120-iso10646-1 (for doublewidth characters) which are included in XFree86 4.0. Please type xterm -fn -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1 and XTerm can automatically detect -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-ja-13-120-75-75-c-120-iso10646-1 font for doublewidth characters.

Please test. Reports on testing or bugs and patches are welcome. Especially, since I use only Debian GNU/Linux, I can hardly test configure script. If you are interested in the development and you'd like to discuss with me (or other developers), please join XFree86 Internationalization mailing list.

Known bugs are:

The followings are my patches. You can download and test.


Tomohiro KUBOTA <debian at tmail dot plala dot or dot jp>