27067 - Cannot change chracter sets to Cyrillic

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(MailNews Core :: Internationalization, defect, P3)

Description

[prosa]

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 [en] (Linux; I)
BuildID:    2000020708
It is not possible to change font character set to Cyrillic. Even in cases when
redacting replies (original post is correctly shown in Cyrillic characters). No
matter whattype of character set is choosen it keeps as iso8859-1
Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.Make a reply from a text in Cyrillic (test was made in Russian koi8-r)
2.Try to switch the keyboard to a Cyrillic language
3.

Actual Results:  It keeps writing in iso8859-1 characters
Expected Results:  It should be writing in cyrillic
The test was made under a KDE environment with kikbd as keyboard switcher.
Netscape Communicator and other programs (except Qt2 based, they have a bug on
localization) work normally.

Comment 1

[nhottanscp]

I think this is a key input problem on Linux, reassign to ftang.

Comment 2

[Frank Tang]

This problem is nasty. The kikbd switch xmodmap. But the russian xmodmap (type 
xmodmap -pke) does not use Cyrillic keysym but Latin 1 keysym. Mozilla simply 
convert the keysym into the locale encoding. If your locale is set to russian 
before launch mozilla, then it will work. If your keysym is set to Cyrillic 
keysym when using other locale, it will still work. Howerver, it won't work if 
the locale is NOT in Russian and the keysym is not set to Cyrillic.

We probably will never fix for this hacky xmodmap. 

You can help by attach your output of xmodmap -pke to me

Comment 3

[Frank Tang]

send message to [e-mail] and [e-mail]

Dear Alexander Budnik (author of kikbd) andDenis V. Dmitrienko (author of 
ruwm.kimap, etc)

Could you please help to take a look at our mozilla bug-  Bugzilla bug 27067 
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27067

What happen is the following-
Mozilla internaly use Unicode in the layout engine. Currently, when we read data 
from the 
keyboard, we use the following two way to convert the keysym into Unicode.
1. XmbLookupString and unicode converter- this will convert all the character 
which fit into the 
locale encoding. Then, we use a unicode converter which convert from the start 
up locale charset 
into unicode
2. In case XmbLookupString do not return any character code, we use the same 
xkeysym to 
unicode mapping table in xterm to convert the keysym into unicode. This mean, if 
you xmodmap 
map some key to a character not in your locale, we can still handle it.

However, we have this problem with kikbd, for the following reason
1. our current code assume the charset of the input character code return from 
XmbLookupString 
never change. 
2. If the input code page may change dynamically, then we need to swtich our 
unicode converter.
In MS window, we listen to a language change notification message to swtich the 
converter. 
However, in X, I don't think such notification mechanism exist. 
3. Currently, the ruwm.kimap map to Latin 1 keysym instead of Cyrillic keysym 
(by looking at the 
xmodmap -pke), this is also part of the problem. It your mapping table map the 
key to Cyrillic 
keysym, then it should work in mozilla. 

I wonder why you create these Russian map which map to latin 1 keysym instead of 
Cyrillic 
keysym and how can it ever work in any application. 

Please provide feedback to us.

Comment 4

[Konstantin Riabitsev]

As a workaround, it can be suggested to ditch kikbd (until the keysums problem
is fixed) and use the builtin X's keyboard switcher, XKB. There is a very good
page available in Russian which explains how to setup and use XKB, plus it
offers a very nifty switcher utility -- xxkb, which you can download and
install. Using XKB, all cyrillic input problems in Mozilla are gone. The page on
XKB is at http://www.tsu.ru/~pascal/

Comment 5

[Frank Tang]

nasty Linux issue. Reassign to [e-mail] for now.

Comment 6

[Hidetoshi Tajima]

No good solution can be found we can do in mozilla code. A workaround solution
Konstantin
posted sounds good enough. Or, get unicode based locales for Linux and run
mozilla on it.

Comment 7

[Katsuhiko Momoi]

OK. So for now, we will have to live with an incomplete situation
as far as the keyboard switching is concerned under non-Russian
locale. A workaround exists. We await a better X support for this type of
needs.
Verified as Wontfix.