Bernhard Rulla writes:

thanks for your support Mike. Although it does not work fully, yet, I am at least able to see some hiragana. :)

What did I do:

1) I returned my system to German values, as you advised in your last mail. 2) I proceed, after booting, with the following commands: export XMODIFIERS="@im=kinput2" LANG=ja_JP kinput2 -xim -kinput -canna & LC_CTYPE=ja_JP kmail

OK, then I can activate the XIM as before but when I push Return, everything converts to small squares. There are no question marks anymore, because I changed the font to jis-fixed and activated unicode for mails. But still, in a mail that I try to write, I see only nothing but squares.

jis-fixed is not a unicode font. If you want to use jis-fixed, you should not activate the "Use unicode font for messages" checkbox, then the square boxes will disappear and you will see Japanese characters. jis-fixed is a font in jisx0208.1983-0 encoding, you will not be able to write German umlauts using that font.G To write German you have to switch back to a font which can display German umlauts. If you often write both, Japanese and German, having to switch fonts all the time will soon become tedious, than you may want to use a Unicode font which contains glyphs for both languages. For example the GNU-Unicode font is suitable for Japanese and German and it is already available on your machine, because it belongs to one of the YaST2 packages. In the font selection box of KDE2 (i.e. in the KMail setup), the GNU-Unicode font is listed as "unifont". If you want to use that font, please check that you have ":unscaled" appended to the relevant FontPath in /etc/X11/XF86config: FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/uni:unscaled" without the ":unscaled", KDE2 may try to scale this font, which will be extremely ugly. Scaled bitmap fonts are always very ugly. Using the GNU-Unicode font for E-Mails will make both German and Japanese readable, but you have only one size available (16 pixel). On top of that, it is a proportional font and E-Mails don't look nice when proportional fonts are used (at least in my opinion). The efont-unicode package ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/mfabian/8.0-noarch/efont-unicode.rpm will give you fonts in a few more sizes (12, 14, 16, 24 pixels) which are monospaced. Use these which are listed with family "biwidth" by xlsfonts: D13:~ # xlsfonts | grep "efont.*medium-r-normal--24" -efont-biwidth-medium-r-normal--24-240-75-75-p-120-iso10646-1 -efont-fixed-medium-r-normal--24-240-75-75-c-120-iso10646-1 -efont-fixed-medium-r-normal--24-240-75-75-c-240-iso10646-1 D13:~ # They appear in the font listing of KMail just as "biwidth". They have "-p-" in their XLFD which means "proportional" because the CJK characters in these fonts are twice as wide as the latin characters, i.e. technically these are not really monospaced fonts. But all latin characters have the same width and all CJK characters have the same width, i.e. for practical purposes in you e-mail composer you can consider them as monospaced fonts. The efonts listed with family "fixed" are pairs of fonts, the one with the smaller value in the average width field contains the latin characters only, the one with the bigger value in the avarage width field the CJK characters only. You need such pairs of fonts for xterm in UTF-8 mode to display CJK characters. For KMail you need the "biwidth" fonts which contain the whole Unicode range. For other sizes, you could use commercial TrueType fonts like Bitstream Cyberbit or MS Arial Unicode which cover almost everything of Unicode 2.0. But both are not free, both are proportional and Bitstream Cyberbit is also very ugly. Probably the fonts from the efont-unicode package are best for German and Japanese e-mail in KMail in KDE2. Or upgrade to Qt3/KDE3 (distributed with SuSE Linux 8.0), then you will have much more fonts to choose from, because in Qt3 you can combine fonts, you don't need to have one single Unicode font to cover everything. See also http://www.suse.de/~mfabian/suse-cjk/kde-font-setup.html

In mails which I received, however, I can identify some hiragana, like in your signature. You write something like XXXX ha i i XX no X da. I see the X as squares. Maybe we can try a counter-test. Can you read this? 日本語は難しいですね。 I wanted to write "Nihongo ha muzukashii desu ne."

Yes, no problem.

...

if you have installed xfntjp.rpm you should have a quite large selection of Japanese bitmap fonts.

Obviously, I have not installed this. I looked for it on rpmfind.org and found some quite large files (16MB), so I backed away from downloading them.

On the German edition of SuSE Linux 7.3 Professional, it is available on CD5: CD5/suse/j2/xfntjp.rpm

Maybe it is a must to do?

It is not absolutely necessary, it just gives you some more Japanese bitmap fonts to choose from. The efont-unicode package is probably more interesting for you if you want to use German *and* Japanese in KMail of KDE2. It is also huge (27MB) and unfortunately it is not on the SuSE Linux 7.3 CD set, i.e. you need download it from the URL given above.

...

If you want Anti-Aliasing, you can use the free Japanese TrueType fonts "Kochi Mincho" and "Kochi Gothic" fonts which are available as well on the SuSE Linux 7.3 CD set.

In the first step, I am keen on seeing complete Japanese text, anti-aliasing comes later. I looked for these two fonts anyway but could not find them on my SuSE CDs. Where do I have to look?

CD5/suse/han1/ttf-kochi-gothic.rpm CD5/suse/han1/ttf-kochi-mincho.rpm If you use YaST2 to install additional package, you will find a 'search' button where you can enter 'xfntjp' or 'kochi'. -- Mike Fabian http://www.suse.de/~mfabian 睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。