About a year ago, I’ve been looking for an alternative to the original QQ software, the biggest chat network in China. One programme I stumbled upon was LumaQQ. But only recently, when Gaim was renamed to Pidgin, its developers have re-introduced a QQ plugin for this free and popular multi-protocol instant messenger. However, Pidgin is not the most friendly programme in terms of usability and frequently causes problems — especially for people who need to exchange messages in Chinese, Japanese or Korean. I therefore decided to give a few hints on how to make Pidgin more equipped for this type of task.

First of all, a little background information: Pidgin has been around for at least as long as Trillian, another popular multi-protocol instant messenger. The Pidgin project, however, is not “stuck” in the same way as Trillian, which has not seen a new release since 2004. Furthermore, Trillian suffers from two more issues: software bloat and commercialization. From the first “Pro” version onwards, the free version of Trillian retained only a few basic features and its users were excluded from the ability to extend their application by plugins. Both versions kept becoming more hardware demanding, although the core functionality ramained more or less unchanged. The reason many people use it anyhow, is because the original ICQ, MSN and AOL clients are no better. ICQ is bloated, MSN suffers from limited configurability and most importantly: each programme’s interface is cluttered with advertising and nonsense. Pidgin closes this gap by providing a simple, modular cross-platform chat application. At the same time, though, it creates new problems, which we will try to tackle here. So let’s get down to business.

Unicode and font issues

Assuming you have Pidgin installed, the first thing you’re going to notice will be the relatively small font which is used by default. The problem here is that you can increase the font size (Tools -> Conversation -> Font), but there is one thing Pidgin has in common with Trillian: they don’t support dynamic font switching — i.e. provided you use a font that is designed for Latin text only and you receive a message in Chinese, your chat app automatically switches to a font that can display Chinese characters. Unlike the original MSN messenger, for example, Pidgin and Trillian don’t do that. So what you will have to do is, chose a text font that can display Latin text and characters in the language you need. Recommendations are: “Sim Sun” for Simplified Chinese, “MingLiU” for Traditional Chinese, “Mincho” for Japanese, “Batang” or “Guilim” for Korean.

Unfortunately, these fonts don’t just fall from the sky. A number of fonts are installed when you install support for East Asian languages (this applies to Windows XP users only). More are included in Microsoft’s Office Proofing Tools, which among other things, also update your IMEs. The central issue here is, though, what do you do when you need more than one Non-Latin language? As for Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK), there are two fonts, that I know of, that can handle this task: “Batang” and “Arial Unicode MS”. As far as I remember, Batang doesn’t handle all Japanese and all Chinese characters, but it’s more widely avaiable and probably okay for the occasional user. “Arial Unicode MS“, on the other hand, looks more modern and blends in better on a Western system. To check which languages are supported by your font, copy the text below and paste it into Pidgin’s chat window:

• 汉语 (Simplified Chinese), 漢語 (Traditional Chinese), 日本語 (Japanese), カタカナ (Japanese Katakana), ひらがな (Japanese Hiragana), 한국어 (Korean)

You will notice that, no matter what you do, you will still occasionally encounter problems when using a third party-client to exchange Unicode messages. Exchanging Unicode messages tends to work between third party-clients, e.g. Pidgin-Trillian, and between the original clients, e.g. ICQ-ICQ, but every now and then you’ll run into trouble when sending a Unicode message from Pidgin to an original client. Especially Korean seems to be very persistent in this regard, but I still wasn’t able to single out a specific reason for this. Perhaps it’s related to the system codepage in some way. Trillian used to cause problems when leaving Chinese offline messages for someone on ICQ. They came out right when the user “forced” Trillian to use UTF-8 encoding, but this somehow didn’t go along too well with German umlauts for example.

Update: The unicode issue persists if the other side is using a non-unicode font. To get Pidgin to ignore font formats, open your Buddy List window and go to Tools –> Preferences –> Conversations and uncheck “Show formatting on incoming messages”.

Optimizing performance

One last thing to make the Pidgin GUI a little faster: Open your start menu, chose “Gtk+”, run the Gtk theme selector and select the “Mist” theme. This theme will demand less system resources and reduce the lag when resizing/scrolling the Pidgin interface.
And one more thing for users of Pidgin’s QQ plugin: The most recent version of Pidgin (version 2.4.2) seems to be suffering from an issue with the latest Gtk runtime — all nicknames on the QQ network and all text that is sent to other users, comes out as (NULL). This is a known issue and can be fixed by reverting back to the old Gtk framwork 2.12.1 rev b. Download and open gtk-runtime-2.12.1-rev-b.exe and chose to replace the current Gtk runtime.

To close this rather lengthy post, I would like to remind you that Pidgin is not for everybody. It will definitely require more “messing around” on the user side than MSN or even Trillian do. It still does not support MSN offline messages and so far there is no support for audio/video chat, although the developers have profited heavily from the Google summer of code, which contributed a lot to the development of these new features. This has drawn criticism from many parties and it could certainly be argued that praising oneself for accomplishments in the past while neglecting an ongoing project doubtlessly hurts the reputation of free software. The devlopers of Pidgin would do well to have a look at Adium, the official chat client for Mac OSX, which uses the Pidgin libraries but outperforms the actual Pidgin client by far. In this regard, the future of Pidgin is just as uncertain as that of, say, Trillian or other free software projects. It’s still a viable alternative for those who don’t want to submit to the “big guys” in the market.

Download Pidgin: