GNOME/GTK issue Akira TAGOH is working: gtk+2 uses UTF-8 in its internal. You need to know what UTF-8 is. Be careful to save legacy encodings. Pango handles CJK font properly. Use generic font name "Sans/Serif", not specific "Courier". Rewrite your code with Pango if your software is gtk 1.2 based. Use immodule if your software is gtk 2.0 based. Use toolkit functions.