Ubuntu, Xemacs and Thai

I recently installed Ubuntu (actually: Kubuntu) to replace an ancient, creaking SuSE installation. While SuSE has always had excellent multilingual support, its evolution into OpenSuse combined with a general tendency to bloat and the various machinations between Novell and Microsoft have led me to try my luck elsewhere, and Ubuntu seems to fit the bill pretty well. The language support is pretty good and it also does Thai fairly well, something which the previous SuSE didn't handle very gracefully.

The only major issue was that Xemacs (which is a bit of a law unto itself) seemed to have taken a disliking to Japanese and German, the other two languages which I work with on a regular basis. For German characters such as umlauted letters it displayed Thai characters, and while it would display freshly inputted Japanese, when loading a new file Japanese came out as random garbage. As I'm an Xemacs person (at least for development), this was a bit of a problem for files containing non-ASCII language strings, of which I seem to have more than I realized.

Of course I seem to be the only person in the world with this peculiar issue, and Google was unable to provide even a hint of an answer, and I've spend several fruitless hours poking away at configuration files (note to self: must learn LISP).

And today, finally, I was struck by a useful blob of inspiration: I uninstalled all the Thai fonts (those in "xfonts" packages), and suddenly Xemacs was back to its usual form, except it was unable to display Thai. Reinstalling the "xfonts-thai-etl" ("Emacs/Mule needs these fonts to display Thai") solved this without messing up the other languages.

So there we have it. On the offchance someone else has this problem and is searching for a solution.