Typing and displaying Unicode Coptic texts under X11

1. Displaying Coptic Unicode text in an editor

Suppose you have already a Coptic text which is for example in UTF-8 format and you would like to display it, take for example the following sample,  (right click with the mouse to download and open with an editor) then, assuming that you work under X11, you must have:

• a Unicode capable editor (like gtk2edit, gedit) or a word processor such as abiword or OpenOffice
  
• an appropriate Unicode font installed in your system, in which the Coptic glyphs are included
  

Since there are many Unicode formats, you must know in which format your text is, in our case UTF-8, and tell the editor when you open it, in which format your text is. Refer to the section: installing Unicode Coptic font for a detailed description of how to install the font.

2. Entering Coptic text in an editor

Now suppose you further would like to modify this text, or write your own text, then you must be able to switch your current keymap to Coptic. For this you have two possibilities:

• you either define a new X11 keymap.
  
• or you use a graphical virtual keyboard, like xvkbd to enter your text.

Both methods are described in the section adding Coptic keyboard mapping.

3. Displaying Coptic text in an X-Terminal

If  for example you would like to display the above sample using  "more" from an X-terminal, then your terminal must have a Unicode support (like gnome terminal) and of course you must set the font of the terminal correctly. For a simple command like "more", this should be sufficient.
But there are a lot other applications that use your current locale of the glibc. A lot of applications also use the ncurses library. In such cases you will further need to:

• modify at least some of your locale files as described in more details: upgrading the glibc locale for Coptic support
• make sure you are using an ncurses library with UTF-support, which should be the case in most modern Linux distributions.
  

---

last updated: 31.05.2006
Moheb Mekhaiel