Version:            (using KDE 4.2.1)
OS:                Linux
Installed from:    Ubuntu Packages

Hello,

I've got the problem that I am chatting with Chinese and Japanese contacts. Because sometimes, the characters do have unique Unicode points, even though they look a little bit different (compare the topic Han unification), it is necessary to change the font. Compare <span lang="ja">画</span> (Japanese) and <span lang="zh">画</span> (Chinese).

It is possible, to write Japanese with a Chinese font and vice versa, but it just does not look nice. It becomes even worse, when a Japanese character is not in a Chinese font.

I have one kind of suggestion for that:

Define multiple types of font styles. I think, this is possible in Kate. It would be extremely cool if this would be possible for entire KDE (or even better, for entire Linux... maybe via fontconfig). 

In my opinion, you could just go to the system control and enter a new style, maybe like "Japanese", in which you could just define a Japanese font.

Now, if I am chatting in Kopete, I would go to the property bar of that specific contact and select the style "Japanese", "Tibetan", "Arabic", whatsoever. After I've done that, Kopete automatically uses the style Japanese for incoming and outgoing messages.

This would also be cool if this could be integrated into kadressbook. You would just define a Japanese person as Japanese, and then all incoming mail, all outgoing mail, all chats in Kopete or whatsoever to that person automatically use a Japanese font. Because I can link Kopete contacts to kadressbook, this could automatically be adopted by every linked KDE application. 

Even better would be if I had a symbol (aditionally) in the toolbar of every KDE application which deals with text transmitting (Web browser, email, IRC, chat etc.). With this symbol, I would just click on it, select the appropriate style and all the fonts would change (without any restart of the application). So if I read a japanese website, which did not set the xml:lang attribute, I would see a Chinese font, which just doesn't look like Japanese. (Compare the effect, if you had a latin text and an á would appear in a different style, just because it is not in your default font). I could just click on the button and it is displayed correctly.

I think this would be extremely cool. I know, it is not really that interesting for most Western users (and also not for Japanese/Chinese users, because they just use their default font), but for all people, who use multiple languages with different fonts, I think this is really essential. 

Please, please, please :)