Read-Only Language Support

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If all you want is to be able to read Web pages or documents written in a foreign language, you don’t need to install any additional language support. In fact, it is possible that you won’t have to do anything at all, depending, of course, on the language in question.

Documents or Web pages written in the Roman alphabet, such as Swedish, Italian, Malaysian, or Tagalog require no additional moves on your part. If in Chapter 16 you installed one of the Microsoft TrueType Core Fonts (specifically Arial, Courier New, or Times New Roman), you will also be able to read pages and documents written in many other languages that use the Roman alphabet but that require special diacritics, such as Vietnamese, as well as languages with alphabetic writing systems that are not Roman, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, or the Cyrillic-based languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, and Bulgarian).

For other languages, however, you will probably have to install fonts for that language. When you come upon a page written in a language for which you have no font support, the text will be displayed as odd symbols, like the Hindi page shown in Figure 17-1.

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Figure 17-1: A Hindi Web page viewed without proper font support

Once you’ve installed the appropriate font set for the language of the page you want to view, the odd symbols will be replaced by the appropriate characters in that font. (In this case, I installed the indic.ttf font, which I downloaded from www.india-n-indian.com/download by right-clicking the Free Indic TTF Font link.) The result is the page being displayed as it should be (see Figure 17-2).

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Figure 17-2: The Hindi Web page after the indic.ttf font is installed

Other than Hindi, the languages that will most likely require you to install specific font packages are Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. These fonts are all included on Install Disk 2. You can find the fonts by double-clicking the Fedora folder on that disk (the RedHat folder, if you are using Red Hat Linux 9 instead of the disks included with this book), and then the RPMS folder within that. Once you have found the fonts, copy the font package you want to the Tarballs_and_RPMs folder on your hard disk. The filenames for these fonts begin with ttfonts:

  • ttfonts-ko for Korean

  • ttfonts-zh_CN for the simplified Chinese characters used in the People’s Republic of China

  • ttfonts-zh_TW for the traditional Chinese characters used in Taiwan

  • ttfonts-ja for Japanese

Once you’ve copied the files, you can install the fonts via the usual double-click method for RPMs.

If you prefer (or need) to, you can download and install any or all of these fonts with Synaptic/APT. To do this, just type ttfonts in the Find box in the main Synaptic window. Once you’ve done that, click the search arrow next to that box. You can then select the fonts you wish to install from the list that Synaptic produces as the result of your search.

Changing the Character Encoding in Mozilla

If you install your new fonts but still cannot view the pages in the language for which you installed the fonts, try changing the character coding in Mozilla. You can do this by going to the Mozilla View menu and selecting Change Coding. From the submenu there, you can select the appropriate coding for the language of that page. Mozilla will usually do this automatically, but sometimes the author of the page may neglect to include the character coding for that page in the HTML, in which case Mozilla, not knowing that the page is prepared in another language, will open in the default language of your system.



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Linux for Non-Geeks. A Hands-On, Project-Based, Take-It-Slow Guidebook
Linux for Non-Geeks: A Hands-On, Project-Based, Take-It-Slow Guidebook
ISBN: 1593270348
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 188

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