Chinese Input and Display Under Fedora's English Locale

The English locale of Fedora Core 1 looks quite polished, but the Chinese locale is still rough around the edges. Can it support reading and writing Chinese under the English locale, the way Windows 2000 does? This article documents how I set up Chinese support on Fedora under the English locale (en_US.UTF-8).

Fedora Installation

Select only the English (USA) locale. Some fonts and input methods will also be installed if you select the Chinese locale, but they are not particularly useful.

Select and install Gnome, Development, Kernel Development, Gnome Development, and X Development. You may skip the development packages if you do not need them.

Fonts Installation

Copy the TrueType fonts you want from Microsoft Windows to /usr/share/fonts/windows/. You can find the fonts in Windows’ \WINNT\Fonts directory.

Then execute the following commands as root:

cd /usr/share/fonts/windows
ttmkfdir .
cp fonts.scale fonts.dir
chkfontpath --add /usr/share/fonts/windows

Here are the fonts I installed:

(Arial) - arial.ttf arialbd.ttf arialbi.ttf ariali.ttf
(Courier New) - cour.ttf courbi.ttf courbd.ttf couri.ttf
(Tahoma) - tahoma.ttf tahomabd.ttf
(Verdana) - verdana.ttf verdanab.ttf verdanai.ttf verdanaz.ttf
(GB) - simsun.ttc
(BIG5) - mingliu.ttc
(KR) - batang.ttc gulim.ttc
(JP) - msgothic.ttc msmincho.ttc

Input Method Installation and Configuration

The Smart Common Input Method platform, SCIM for short, is an input method that works under the English locale. You can download it from its website http://www.turbolinux.com.cn/~suzhe/scim/. I installed the following two RPM packages:

rpm -hUv scim-0.8.2-1.i586.rpm
rpm -hUv scim-chinese-0.2.6-1.i586.rpm

Next, you need to modify the file /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/xinput in order to start SCIM automatically when X starts. Here is the patch:

115c115,118
< XIM="none"
---
> # XIM="none"
> if [ -e /usr/bin/scim ]; then
> XIM="SCIM"
> fi
174a178,180
> SCIM)
> XIM_PROGRAM=scim
> XIM_ARGS="-d" ;;

If you wish, you can also change the zh_CN*), zh_TW*), etc. sections to use SCIM under those locales as well.

You also need to modify the file /etc/gtk-2.0/gtk.immodules to use X input methods in GTK applications. Here is the patch:

37c37
< "xim" "X Input Method" "gtk20" "/usr/share/locale" "ko:ja:zh"
---
> "xim" "X Input Method" "gtk20" "/usr/share/locale" "en:ko:ja:zh"

You may also want to comment out any input methods you do not need.

Done

Restart X.