how to make user account partially bi-lingual? [CLOSED]

[William Mattison]

> From: William Mattison <wcmattison at yahoo.com>
>To: "users at lists.fedoraproject.org" <users at lists.fedoraproject.org> 
>Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2013 9:03 PM
>Subject: how to make user account partially bi-lingual?

>(Fedora-18; all desktops)
>
>A user needs all
>* menu entries, buttons, prompts, messages, application icon labels, etc.
>within
>* desktops (Gnome, KDE, Xfce, etc.), all LibreOffice applications, vi, etc.
>to be English.
>
>
>But he needs to be able to both
>* enter and view
>text in both
>* English and  simplified Chinese
>within
>* vi,
 all LibreOffice applications, internet e-mail (Yahoo mail, gmail, etc.), etc.
>where most files/messages will contain a mix of English and simplified Chinese.
>
>How does root and/or the user set up his account so he always has these abilities?  In effect, we want the account to be bi-lingual, with English as the primary language, and simplified Chinese being a secondary language.
>
>
>Thank-you in advance for your help.
>Bill.

When diagnosing and solving this started involving screen captures, I decided to take this off-line with Ed Greshko.    With a lot of
 excellent help from Ed, everything I believe I want or need to do, I can now do somehow.  It would take a lot to spell it all out.  I'll try to summarize.  I'll keep referring to Chinese (meaning "simplified" Chinese) here, but I suspect this applies to some other languages as well.


* It may be necessary to download RPMs for Chinese.  You'll need Chinese fonts and "ibus" (the tool needed for input of Chinese characters).
* In the chosen desktop's customization GUI, a user can select more than one language.  He should make sure English is the display language.  But the list of available languages must include Chinese.
* The "ibus" tool should be chosen for input of Chinese.  "ibus" is configurable.
* UTF-8 is the preferred encoding for text in files.
* Make sure the encoding in terminal windows and LibreOffice applications is set correctly.  The encoding in terminal windows and LibreOffice applications must match the encoding of the text in the files being edited.
* Make sure the font in terminal windows and LibreOffice applications is set to something that provides glyphs for Chinese.
* The "file" command is useful for determining the encoding within many (but not all) files.
* The "iconv" command is useful for converting files from one encoding to another.

Along the way, four bugs were found.  Two bugs were already reported in Bugzilla:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=890474

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=918308

One new bug was reported by Ed:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=956512

One bug was reported by myself in both
 Redhat and LibreOffice (freedesktop):

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=960768
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64678

There are work-arounds to all four bugs if you're not tied to one desktop manager and one terminal, and you're flexible about font face and size.

The last two bugs (Redhat #960768 and LibreOffice #64678) appear to be already closed, prematurely in my opinion.  The others appear to still be open. 
 Therefore, I termed this thread "[CLOSED]", not "[SOLVED]".

I thank Ed for all his help on this.

Bill.
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