I recentley switched from iso-8859-? to utf-8. Since then sylpheed (tried version 1.0.3 and 1.0.4) shows some odd behaviour: 1. Sylpheed takes about ten seconds to start and during that time "top" shows a processor usage of 99% for the "X" process. 2. Sylpheed does not display german "umlaute" (
I recentley switched from iso-8859-? to utf-8. Since then sylpheed (tried version 1.0.3 and 1.0.4) shows some odd behaviour: 1. Sylpheed takes about ten seconds to start and during that time "top" shows a processor usage of 99% for the "X" process. 2. Sylpheed does not display german "umlaute" (äöü) properly - this applies to the menus and mail folders, I do not have any UTF-8 encoded mail content to test. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. change /etc/profile according to your language to something similar: export LANG="de_CH.UTF-8" export LC_ALL="de_CH.UTF-8" export LANGUAGE="de_CH.UTF-8" 2. start sylpheed and wait for a few seconds 3. switch back temporarily to language env without utf-8 and see sylpheed start at normal speed The second problem I mentioned is actually fairly easy to pinpoint (but I do not know what has to be done to solve it): sylpheed uses gettext. Looking at some files in /usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES I noticed that the sylpheed.mo file is encoded in ISO-8859-?, whilst other files are encoded in UTF-8 (I can easily establish this looking at how many bytes one german umlaut occupies in those files).
Sorry, this problem seems to be of a more general nature really. Problem number one also occurs with other programs using gettext (gimp as an example). The time it takes to start up an application varies hugely (from 10 to 30 seconds), not counting the real program startup time.
Related to slowly starting apps I get the following output on the terminal: Gdk-WARNING **: Missing charsets in FontSet creation Gdk-WARNING **: JISX0208.1983-0 Gdk-WARNING **: KSC5601.1987-0 Gdk-WARNING **: GB2312.1980-0 Gdk-WARNING **: JISX0201.1976-0 output is repeated 4 times
Halfway there: installing media-fonts/intlfonts-1.2.1 AND setting the FontPath in xorg.conf to FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/intlfonts" solves the problem for two of the four fontsets (JISX020*). gdk still complains about the other two fontsets, but the startup speed of sylpheed is increased enormously (from 10 to 20 seconds down to maybe three seconds). I do not consider this problem solved yet, but at least I'm a great step forward. Any ideas where the other two fontsets are hidden?
I have not been able to solve any problems I still had in my last comment. In the meantime I've changed to sylpheed version 2, which is based on gtk2. gtk2 has builtin unicode support, thus everything works out-of-the-box in sylpheed-2. Seeing that sylpheed-2 is becoming stable (currently sylpheed-2.0.0-rc1) and sylpheed-2 is really as fast and as easy to handle as sylpheed-1, I'd recommend switching to sylpheed-2.