Cfrtjryk

So I'm trying to add kind of a word of the day thing to conky, but with Chinese words. There's a few ways I've tried this and with no success.

I have my words saved in a csv file formatted like

电脑,dia4nna3o,computer

In conky I've tried running

${exec mycommand}

Where mycommand has been several things:

1) Writing a python script that will print out a random line. Results in nothing (works in bash)

2) A bash script that echos the a random line. Results in nothing (works in bash)

3) Trying to convert the output from one of the above to an image and then displaying that image. Using

python randword.py | convert label:@- tmp.png

to convert the text to an image. While this displays an image, there is nothing where the Chinese character should be (but the English characters are there). Looks like this:

I'm really at a loss of what to do. Any idea?

System Info:
Distro: Manjaro x86_64
DE: XFCE
Conky Version:

[ steven ] [~] > conky --version                                        

conky 1.10.6_pre compiled Thu Dec 29 16:29:51 UTC 2016 for Linux 4.1.37-1-MANJARO x86_64



Compiled in features:



System config file: /etc/conky/conky.conf

Package library path: /usr/lib/conky





 General:

  * math

  * hddtemp

  * portmon

  * IPv6

  * Curl

  * RSS

  * Weather (METAR)

  * Weather (XOAP)

  * wireless

  * support for IBM/Lenovo notebooks

  * nvidia

  * builtin default configuration

  * old configuration syntax

  * Imlib2

  * apcupsd

  * iostats

  * ncurses

  * Internationalization support



 Lua bindings:

  * Cairo

  * Imlib2

  * RSVG

 X11:

  * Xdamage extension

  * Xinerama extension (virtual display)

  * XDBE (double buffer extension)

  * Xft

  * ARGB visual

  * Own window



 Music detection:

  * MPD

  * MOC



 Default values:

  * Netdevice: eth0

  * Local configfile: $HOME/.conkyrc

  * Localedir: /usr/share/locale

  * Maximum netdevices: 64

  * Maximum text size: 16384

  * Size text buffer: 256

You will need to have a suitable font, and also set the locale for conky. I tried the following on a Linux Fedora using conky 1.10.4. Install a font:

sudo dnf install google-noto-cjk-fonts 

Create a file with some utf8 character:

    printf 'xe5xbax83n' >chars

Create a .conkyrc that sets a global cjk font, and also tries setting a variant within the text part, and uses cat to read the above file:

conky.config = {

    minimum_height = 400,

    minimum_width = 600,

    font = 'Noto Sans CJK TC Regular:size=40',

    use_xft = true,

 };

conky.text = [[

 start  ${exec cat chars}  end

 ${font Noto Sans CJK TC Bold:size=20} start ${exec cat chars} end ${font}

]]

Run conky in a utf8 locale

    LC_ALL=en_US.utf8 conky -c .conkyrc -o

to get the result: