# X11 foreign language input help (specifically Japanese)



## wirebound (Jul 9, 2008)

Hi,

I have a PowerBook G4 with OSX 10.4.11. I just heard about OpenOffice.org and the ability to use RUBY to put furigana over kanji characters. In order to use this, I needed to install X11 on my computer.

I don't know anything about open source, so I'm really sorry for my ignorance about this. Honestly, I don't even know what X11 is - just that it has something to do with open source and that I need it to use OOo.

Now that I have OOo installed, I'm having issues actually using it to create documents in Japanese (which is the main reason I installed it). When using programs that aren't related to X11, I have no problem toggling between foreign languages. I have in international language preferences set up so that I can switch between French, English and Japanese by pressing shift-cmnd-space. I have Japanese fonts installed on my computer, and have no problem reading Japanese fonts on websites, emails, etc. But with X11, there seems to be a problem recognizing the fonts. 

When I run OOo, all of the fonts in my fontbook are listed, and the Japanese fonts are displayed correctly in the dropdown menu. But, once I select the Japanese font I want, it doesn't recognize the Japanese characters where the font name is displayed (it just shows boxes). If I try to type, I only get roman characters, not Japanese ones. My international language preferences don't seem to work, as there is no way to use the kotoeri program to deal with kanji, hiragana, and katakana. If I manually change the language settings on the finder bar to hiragana (where the little flag is), it doesn't recognize it in X11.

From all the forums I've scoured, I seem to need some kind of font package installed for X11, but I can't figure out which one I need. They all seem to be related to debian and ubutu (??), and I have no idea what the heck those are or what they mean. I tried to download and install the xfonts-intl-japanese package, but it was a .deb (which I'm assuming is debian?), but I can't open it on my computer.

So, I guess my questions are:
What font packages do I need (for Japanese and French)?
Where can I get said font packages?
Once I have the font packages installed, how do I set up X11 to toggle between which language I want to type in?

Again, I'm sorry for my ignorance on this. Everything that I looked at seemed really complicated and involved a bunch of code, and I had no idea what it was talking about.

Thanks in advance. 

Junko (pronounced June-ko and Junk-o)


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## sinclair_tm (Mar 11, 2005)

You have a very intresting, and valid question. First, a little background on X11. Mac OS X is a unix based OS. What you see, aka the Finder, is Apple's GUI for the unix core, and it's called Aqua. X11 is another GUI for Unix, and in fact is one that you can install on many different distros of unix. For Mac OS X, there are 2 main X11 systems you could install. One is Apple's, and you can find it on the OS install disk under Addtional Installs. The other is XQuartz. The best way to describe XQuartz is that it is the community updated version of Apple's X11, in otherwords, it is most time more up to date to the standard X11 releases, and Apple isn't the one doing it. So the reason your Finder/OS X settings for language isn't working in X11 apps is because it's a different GUI for unix core, and bascilly has it's own settings, hence the need to install it's own fonts. As for what fonts to install, and how, I'll have to research on that one, as I don't know. The first place that I'd look is at Fink. Fink is a simple way to find, download, compile, and install unix software that is taliored to the Mac. You'll download and install Fink, then use Fink Commander to see all the avalible software. If you find a package that you want to use, then it'll download it, compile it if need be, and install it. You may find a language pack from the list in Fink Cmmander that will do what you need. Just remember that you need to have the developers software for OS X installed to use Fink correctly. That can be found on either in OS X install disk, or on a second disk labeled Developer's Tools, or downloaded for free from Apple's developer's website after creating a free account.


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## wirebound (Jul 9, 2008)

Hey thanks! I actually understood all that.

Yeah, when I was looking around on the internet for stuff, I ran into Fink, but had no idea what it was. I'll go check it out and see if I can get it to work.

Someone also suggested NeoOffice to me, so I downloaded that and it works perfectly for what I need. And since it's through OSX, I didn't have to download a bunch of other stuff to make it work.

But it would still be nice to use some other X11 programs, so I still want to get the language stuff to work.

Anyway, thanks for all the explanations that were completely understandable to someone like me that knows nothing about computers.

Thanks!


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