Viewing and creating Japanese documents under GNU/Linux

Last modified 2011-Oct-19.

Creating Japanese documents

• Enabling system-wide Japanese input. (Note that emacs has its own separate Japanese input method, so if you only want to create Japanese text using emacs you can skip this.) To enable system-wide Japanese input in recent versions of GNU/Linux such as Fedora 13+, use the Anthy method via IBus.

  yum install scim-lang-japanese
  

  Then configure it via the Gnome Panel,

  System -> Preferences -> Input Method
  Use IBus
  Input Method Preferences -> select the tab labelled "Input Method"
  click on top button "select an input method", select Japanese > Anthy 
  click "Add"
  

  To activate Anthy, press CTRL+SPACE. Then you can type in romaji and hiragana will appear. To start cycling thorugh kanji for the underlined region, press SPACE. To accept the current form press RETURN. To toggle to/from Katakana, press F7. To switch off Anthy press CTRL+SPACE again.
  Emacs users: Note that CTRL+SPACE is also the key combination used for "set mark" in emacs. If you want to avoid a conflict, you can change the Anthy enabling sequence to something else, like CTRL+SLASH, by right-clicking on the IBus icon in the panel and selecting "Preferences". Under the "General" tab, look at the first item, "Keyboard Shortcuts > Enable or disable". Click on the three dots to the right, highlight "Control+space", and in the editable text entry box labelled "Key code" change "space" to "slash", then "Apply", and then click "OK".
• Creating a simple Japanese text file using emacs: How to create a Japanese text file using emacs.
• Typesetting Japanese text using LaTeX: How to create Japanese language documents under GNU/Linux using LaTeX.

Viewing Japanese documents

With the correct fonts installed, a Japanese text file can be viewed with emacs (as long as the correct coding is specified, see How to create Japanese text file using emacs), or with a web browser. And a Japanese PostScript or PDF file can be viewed using evince, gv, xpdf, or the Acrobat Reader.

1. Install the system-wide Japanese font packages

   In Fedora 13 the relevant packages are japanese-bitmap-fonts, vlgothic-fonts, and vlgothic-fonts-common. In earlier releases the names were different, e.g. in Fedora Core 4 and later there was a package fonts-japanese; in Fedora Core 3 and earlier there was ttfonts-ja and fonts-ja.
   Once the bitmap font packages are installed, make sure they are in the X11 font path. Under Fedora 8 and later, list the contents of /etc/X11/fontpath.d (xset q will tell you if X knows about this font catalogue directory). There should be a japanese-bitmap entry (or "fonts-japanese" in earlier releases). Under Fedora 7 and earlier, type chkfontpath and look for entries like /usr/share/fonts/japanese/misc and /usr/share/fonts/japanese/TrueType (In older versions they may be abbreviated to /usr/share/fonts/ja/misc and /usr/share/fonts/ja/TrueType).

2. Japanese PDF

   If you use xpdf then it should work, using the system-wide Japanese fonts. If you want to use Adobe's acroread then it may require an extra step. For acroread 6,7,8 you just go to The Adobe font pack website, specify your platform and acroread version, and download the font pack file. Untar it and (as root) run the INSTALL command in the resultant JPNKIT directory. The default place to install the fonts, /usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0/Resource/Font, is the correct one, assuming you have a generic installation of acroread.

Printing Japanese documents

Most printers outside Japan do not have Japanese fonts resident on them, so even if your computer has the Japanese fonts installed, they will not appear in printout. I use PostScript printers: when setting up the printer (using system-config-printer under Fedora) you should go to the "Driver Options" tab for the printer queue and under "Ghostscript pre-filtering" select "Embed ghostscript fonts only". This will cause Japanese fonts to be uploaded to the printer.

Mark Alford's home page