International Language Support Guide

During your installation, the installation language you select becomes your default language after installation. The figure below illustrates the language selection window during installation. The selected language affects the default for: These areas will be discussed later in this guide.

During installation you can also install support for multiple languages from the package selection window as illustrated below.

After installation, you can still add, remove and change supported languages using the Package Manager. The Package Manager can be accessed from the system menu by clicking Applications => Add/Remove Software. In the first tab you can view the application categories among which is “Languages” from which you can select the languages you wish to support. Please select only the languages you wish to use as this can save you a significant amount of disk space. The language selection feature in the Package Manager is illustrated below. Some languages have optional packages which you can select and install.

After installation, you can set the default keyboard by clicking System => Administration => Keyboard from the system menu panel or by typing system-config-keyboard from a terminal. This displays a list of supported keyboard from which you can select the appropriate keyboard for your system. The figure below illustrates the Keyboard Selection utility.

To add fonts for an individual user, copy the new fonts into the ~/.fonts/ directory in the user's home directory. Use the fc-cache command to update the font information cache, as in the following example:

fc-cache ~/.fonts/

More options on using the fc-cache can be obtained from the fc-cache man page:

man fc-cache

Another easier method to add fonts is as follows:

The new fonts you install should be usable by most GNOME applications. Some applications may have to be restarted to use the newly added fonts.

To install fonts for all users you need to login as root and create a directory under /usr/share/fonts/ for example /usr/share/fonts/custom. Copy the fonts you wish to add into the directory you created and run:

fc-cache -f /usr/share/fonts/

All existing and new users should now be able to use the installed fonts.

The X server looks for a font server specified in the FontPath directive within the Files section of the /etc/X11/xorg.conf configuration file.

The X server connects to the xfs server on a specified port to acquire font information. For this reason, the xfs service must be running for X to start.

The Panel list item allows you to configure the SCIM toolbar and its behavior. You can set when and how to show the SCIM toolbar and any candidate window. The SCIM toolbar is illustrated in Figure 7.1, “SCIM Panel” while the input language menu is illustrated in Figure 7.2, “SCIM language menu”.

You can configure SCIM by right clicking on the SCIM notification icon displayed on your taskbar and selecting SCIM Setup. You can also configure SCIM by clicking on System => More Preferences => SCIM Input Method Setup from your system menu.

This will display the installed input method engines. Deselect those languages you do not intend to input in. Also deselect any input methods you do not wish to use for the languages you wish to input in. Please refer to Table 7.1, “Input Method Packages in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5” and Table 2.1, “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 International Languages” both of which indicates the supported input methods and for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

Please note that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 supports the Chewing input method for traditional Chinese and Smart-Pinyin for simplified Chinese.

Most Indic languages have 3 types of keymaps, namely:

Other keymaps are language dependant. For example, many languages have:

To write in an Indic language perform the following:

The iconv tool converts the encoding of characters in a file from one coded character set to another. The result is written to standard output unless otherwise specified by the --output option. When doing conversions it is always a good idea to backup ones original files first.

The following are some useful examples of using the iconv tool. See the iconv (1) manpage for more details.

The convmv is a tool for converting the character-set encoding of file names. It is particularly useful for converting file names encoded in a legacy charset encoding such as ISO-8859 to UTF-8, or EUC to UTF-8. Please ensure you install the convmv package to use this tool. The following are examples of options available using the convmv tool.

convmv runs in test mode by default, one needs to use the --notest option for the changes to be actually effected. See the convmv (1) manpage for more details.

Firefox is the default web browser in RHEL5. Firefox allows you to browse web pages in many languages. An upto date list of languages supported in the latest release of Firefox can be found on http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html.

Web pages you access may be available in more than one language. To display pages in your preferred language, please set your preferred language order by selecting from the Firefox menu Edit > Preferences > Advanced icon > General tab and Language section. Click on the Choose button to add or edit your preferred languages list. The Languages window will be displayed listing the order of preference for languages you wish to display content in. Click on the Select a language to add... list to display a list of languages supported by your version of Firefox. Languages not listed are not supported. Click on the Add button to add the selected language. You may then move your preferred languages up or down the list of preferred languages. You can also remove a language from the list of prefer ed languages by selecting it and clicking on the Remove button. When done click on the OK button to save your changes or Cancel to cancel the operation.

More documentation on the firefox web browser can be found by clicking on the Help menu item and selecting Help Contents F1 or by pressing the F1 key on your keyboard while the Firefox browser window is active.

Evolution is a communications tool that helps you manage your emails, address book, tasks and multiple calendars.

If you wish to write an email in a supported preferred language, open a mail composition window for a new mail or click on reply or forward for an existing email. To change the encoding of your mail, select Edit > Character encoding and choose the language encoding that you wish to send the message in. You can set the default encoding for messages you receive and send by selecting in the main window Edit > Preferences, then select the Mail Preferences or Composer Preferences sections. These contain a Default character encoding list from which you can select your preferred character encoding. If you are unsure which encoding to use, select UTF-8, which offers the greatest range of character displays for the greatest range of languages.

More information on Language support for Evolution can be found on the application's documentation which can be obtained by pressing F1 while the application window is active. You can also click on the Help menu item and selecting Contents F1 from the list of options.

gedit is the official text editor used in the GNOME desktop. gedit also provides support for syntax highlighting for various programming languages including C, C++, Java, HTML, XML, Python, Perl among others.

When opening a file (from the menu File > Open), you can specify the character encoding for a file under the Character Coding section in the Open File window. By default gedit can also auto detect the character encoding.

When saving a file (from the menu File > Save As) you can also specify the character encoding to use for the file in the Character Coding section of the "Save As" window. On selecting the preferred character encoding, click on the Save button. More information on using gedit including latest updates can be obtained on http://www.gedit.org.