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Xfig and non-ASCII Characters

Do you want to use characters other than Latin-1 on xfig? OK. You can probably use internationalization facility to enable it, as described below.

ISO-8859-n Characters on Xfig

You should then put following lines to app-defaults file:

    Fig.international: true
    Fig.inputStyle: Root
    Fig.eucEncoding: false
    !Fig.latinKeyboard: true

You may or may not want to remove ``!'' at the lastest line.

And then, set LANG environment variable to the desired locale (czech, for example) and start xfig, then select Times-Roman or Times-Bold on TEXT FONT and enter text from keyboard. If everything was OK, you may enter locale specific characters here, using localized keyboard and/or ``dead keys''.

Export in PostScript

In the PostScript header file, Times-Roman-iso and Times-Bold-iso must be redefined to the font in the locale dependent encoding. If you have appropriate font for the locale, the PostScript header file can be simple as:

  /Times-Roman-iso /Times-Roman-Latin2 findfont definefont pop
  /Times-Bold-iso /Times-Roman-Latin2 findfont definefont pop

PostScript header files for some locales

Except Japanese and Korean, those PostScript header files generate those fonts from general Times-Roman and Times-Bold fonts, or they include font itself. This means no special fonts are required to process the PostScript file generated with those header files.

Unfortunately, some of them makes the resulting PostScript file very large (for example, iso8859-7.ps makes the PostScript files 200kB larger), and this can be a problem when many PostScript (EPS) files are inserted into a document.

Encoding	Languages	Header File
ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1)	English, French, Spanish, German, etc.	not required
ISO-8859-2 (Latin-2)	Czech, Hungarian, Polish, etc.	iso8859-2.ps
ISO-8859-4 (Latin-4) *1	Estonian, Latvian, etc.	iso8859-4.ps
ISO-8859-7	Greek	iso8859-7.ps
ISO-8859-8 *2	Hebrew, Yaddish	iso8859-8.ps
ISO-8859-9 (Latin-5)	Turkish	iso8859-9.ps
ISO-8859-11 (Thai) *3	Thai	iso8859-11.ps
ru_RU.KOI8 *4	Russian (Cyrillic)	ru_RU.KOI8.ps
Czech	Czech	czech.ps
ja_JP.eucJP *5	Japanese	japanese.ps
ja_JP.UTF-8	Japanese	ja_JP.UTF-8
ko_KR.eucKR *5	Korean	korean.ps

^*1 Glyph of lattin letter eng (characters at BD and BF) in iso8859-4.ps are probably completly wrong.

^*2 iso8859-8.ps (Hebrew) doesn't support Bold font now.

^*3 Characters at DF, FA and FB are dropped from iso8859-11.ps.

^*4 For Cyrillic, ISO-8859-5 is not prepared yet. I couldn't find suitable Cyrillic font for the encoding.

^*5 japanese.ps and korean.ps are contained in the fig2dev 3.2.3 distribution. See also section Internationalization of the Xfig User Manual.

If you want to use those languages, you can get appropriate header file and put it as $LANG.ps ($LANG is locale name you use) in the directory specified with FIG2DEV_LIBDIR when installing fig2dev (you should find some files such as ja_JP.eucJP.ps in the directory).

If everything was OK, you may export figure with those characters and print it to PostScript printer, or process the PostScript file with GhostScript.

Notes

• You must have fonts for the language on your X server, of cause. You may need to set Fig.normalFontSet and Fig.boldFontSet so that appropriate fonts can be selected.

• Your X server may need to support localized keyboard and/or ``dead keys'' to input exotic characters.

• non-Latin-1 characters can be used only when Times-Roman or Times-Bold is selected as TEXT FONT.

• Usally, non-Latin-1 characters can't be edited on Edit panel. However, text can be edited on the canvas of xfig, by simply click the text on the canvas while TEXT mode in the drawing mode panel is selected.

• For redhat Linux 6.x, and for Czech, RPMS prepared by Ales Horak may be found at: ftp://charon.fi.muni.cz//pub/redhat-mycontrib/rh-6.x/RPMS/i386/, files transfig-3.2.3-3.i386.rpm and xfig-3.2.3-3.i386.rpm.

Thanks

Fonts in iso8859-7.ps (Greek), iso8859-8.ps (Hebrew), iso8859-9.ps (Thai) and ru_RU.KOI8.ps (Cyrillic) are derived from other people's work. See those files for details.

Reference

• ISO-8859 Character Set

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