Re: [XBoard-devel] Enabled more translations

[Tim Mann]

A couple of updates on this.

First, Chinese is usable for me now, with no changes. I don't know what I was doing wrong the first try. Users may find it necessary to change the -messageFont and -clockFont lists to get suitable results, depending on exactly what fonts are installed on their systems. With the default lists and the fonts installed right now on my system, zh_CN.utf8 and zh_HK.utf8 look OK, while zh_TW.utf8 leaves all the Chinese characters blank. I don't understand this fully by any means -- I think it has something to do with some fonts having only characters from the Simplified Chinese set while Taiwan uses Traditional Chinese, but some experimenting shows that zh_TW.utf8 will work with lists that cause other fonts to be searched for. For instance, this works for me:

LANG=zh_TW.utf8 xboard -messageFont '-arphic-*-*-r-normal--*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*,-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*' -clockFont '-arphic-*-*-r-normal--*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*,-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*'

Second, I found a workaround for the MS Core Fonts not working in en_US.utf8. Not within xboard, unfortunately; only by editing an X configuration file. The reason this works remains a mystery right now. It's entirely possible this issue occurs only in the X version that happens to be in Ubuntu 10.04.

--- /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/XLC_LOCALE.1004_orig    2010-02-03 13:05:37.000000000 -0800
+++ /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/XLC_LOCALE    2011-06-05 23:32:00.042473477 -0700
@@ -103,14 +103,18 @@
     }
 }
 #    fs14 class (ISO8859 families)
-fs10    {
-    charset    {
-        name    ISO8859-14:GR
-    }
-    font    {
-        primary    ISO8859-14:GR
-    }
-}
+# XXX mann Commented out.  Somehow, having this here stops XCreateFontSet
+# from finding *any* fonts if arial (or any other TrueType font?) is at the
+# start of the pattern list -- even if the TrueType fonts should be usable,
+# and even if *later* fonts in the list are usable too.
+#fs10    {
+#    charset    {
+#        name    ISO8859-14:GR
+#    }
+#    font    {
+#        primary    ISO8859-14:GR
+#    }
+#}
 #    fs15 class (ISO8859 families)
 fs11    {
     charset    {

On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 8:19 PM, Tim Mann <address@hidden> wrote:

I pushed a commit that fixes some small bugs in the translations that we weren't using and enables them.

Chinese still isn't usable because XCreateFontSet fails. This seems similar to the issue that prevents "arial" from working with en_US even though it works with ru_RU. That is, in both cases there are scalable fonts known to xlsfonts that should work, but XCreateFontSet rejects them for unknown reasons. At some point I'll experiment and figure out why scalable fonts work for ru_RU but not other locales.

  --Tim