Notes on getting japanese printing working and japanese input working for kde apps, just in case others happen to be tearing their hair out dealing with these issues as I was for a few days. I managed to fine tune the system a bit since my last posting. I made good progress getting printing in firefox to work. However a couple of small issues arose. The main one was that I found myself unable to get Japanese entry in any KDE apps. Well, since I had performed an English install and had installed Japanese stuff manually, I forgot to install scim-qtimm and scim-tables-ja. Without these it would seem utterly impossible to get scim to activate during use of a kde app. After installing these packages, Japanese input in all of the kde apps I tried worked as well as the firefox and other gtk based apps which I had working originally. I also discovered that while RC_LC_ALL set to ja_JP.UTF-8 enables ghostscript to properly render Japanese pages, it also tends to make Japanese a little too pervasive. For example, RC_LC_MESSAGES must be set to ja_JP in order to convince ghostscript to render Japanese pages properly. Setting RC_LC_ALL also achieves the same effect even if RC_LC_MESSAGES is not specifically set. However, RC_LC_MESSAGES also controls the language for the GIMP's menus. So, with RC_LC_ALL or RC_LC_MESSAGES set to a Japanese setting, the GIMP menus are all in Japanese (in spite of the fact that no other menus seem to be in Japanese.) Well to make the GIMP understandable I simply edited the start menu entry as follows: LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8" gimp which resets the variable to allow English menus in the GIMP but doesn't affect other apps (including ghostscript.) However a setting of RC_LC_ALL equal to ja_JP.UTF-8 overrides the LC_MESSAGES so if RC_LC_ALL is set, it's impossible to run the GIMP in English. So I decided on the following: RC_LANG gets en_US.UTF-8, and RC_LC_MESSAGES, RC_LC_C_TYPE, RC_LC_COLLATE, AND RC_LC_MONETARY all get ja_JP.UTF-8. I set the others besides RC_LC_MESSAGES to Japanese settings since I reside in Japan. I wish I could do it the other way around -- set the MESSAGES variable to Japanese only when printing via Ghostscript and leave it set to English normally, in order to get English messages to standard out (for example vi and bash messages etc.) So if anyone has a suggestion... But for now, I'm pretty satisfied by having a 95% English system that is able to input and print Japanese. Mike __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site! http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/