Contents
--------
1. Introduction
2. 8-bit locales
     2.1 Fonts
     2.2 Keyboard
3. UTF-8 locale
     3.1 Fonts
     3.2 Keyboard
4. Contact

1. Introduction
---------------
AbiWord supports the standard localisation mechanism using LANG
and LC_ variables (if you are not familiar with this mechanism
see `man locale' as well as the relevant HOWTOs). It works with 
both 8-bit locales and UTF-8 locale. However, if you are using
locale different than Latin-1 (iso 8859-1) there are some things
you will need to do to get correct behaviour. Please note that 
this document does not contain instructions how to set up a 
particular locale on your machine, only things you will need to
do to get AbiWord working under non-Latin-1 locales. (For 
general instructions on how to setup a particular locale on your
computer, you should see the relevant HOWTO.)



2. 8-bit locales
----------------
2.1 Fonts
The default AbiWord locale is en_US. If you use a different, non-
Latin-1 locale, you will need to provide your own fonts. AbiWord
fonts are located in /usr/local/AbiSuite/fonts directory (unless
you chose to install elsewhere, of course). You need to create
a directory in the fonts directory named according to your encoding.
For instance if you are going to use Hebrew locale, you create a 
directory ISO-8859-8. The name of this directory has to correspond
exactly to the encoding reported by your locale variables. If you 
are using Bash, try

# echo $LANG

You should see something like 

# he_IL.ISO-8859-8

It is important that the encoding (the part after the dot) is 
specified explicitely, i.e., if you see something like

# he_IL

it will not work. Setting the LANG variable prior to starting
AbiWord is easy, in Bash you do something like

# LANG=he_IL.ISO-8859-8
# export LANG


Once you have the locale specific directory, you put your fonts in it 
in the same manner you would install additional fonts into the main 
fonts directory (you will find details in the UnixFonts.txt document).


2.2 Keyboard
There is nothing you need to do about your keyboard for the sake of 
AbiWord, it should be set up as is normal under the locale in question.


3. UTF-8 locale
---------------
3.1 Fonts
To use UTF-8 locale with AbiWord, you will need to install Unicode
fonts; AbiWord does not support font sets. In my experience, it is
not possible to set up pfa and pfb fonts under XFree86 4.0.2 to 
behave as Unicode fonts (if you find a way to register a pfa font
with the server as a Unicode font, please let me know, so that I can
update this document). Thus you may have to use TTF fonts only. You
will find general instructions on installing and using TTf fonts with
AbiWord in the UnixFonts.txt document.

Otherwise, the general procedure is the same as for 8-bit locales.

3.2 Keyboard
Under UTF-8 locale AbiWord uses the same keyboard handling mechanism
that the UTF-8 enabled xterm does, and your keyboard can generate
arbitrary Unicode values. There are two ways to assign a Unicode 
character to a key. (1) you can use one of the standard X keysym names;
(2) assign a numerical value to the key that you obtain by adding the
Unicode code to 0x01000000. For instance to assign Hebrew letter Aleph
(U+05d0) to a key, you can either use the X name hebrew_aleph or 
0x010005d0 (please note that the latter mechanism only works for 
characters with values < 0xffff).

The deails of how to assign a value to a key can be found in xmodmap
documentation (if you use KDE, you can use the very convenient 
international keyboard utility, but will have to create your own
kibd file).

4. Contact
This document was created by <tomas@frydrych.uklinux.net>.