During discussion debian bug report #280124, (http://bugs.debian.org/280124),
Toni Mueller provided the following hints to make psi display chinese glyphs
correctly.

I'm not sure if this still applies to current versions of psi - just adding it
here, as it's perhaps useful for people who want to use psi with chinese
or similar character sets.

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On Mon, 05.11.2007 at 10:31:25 +0100, Jan Niehusmann <jan@debian.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 09:47:56AM +0200, Toni Mueller wrote:
> > On Sun, 07.10.2007 at 12:28:03 +0200, Toni Mueller <support@oeko.net> wrote:
> > > I've been struggling with getting PSI to show chinese glyphs well, but
> > > it often displays only an empty box instead of the glyph I want,
> > > whereas at least kbookmarkmanager and kaddressbook display all of them
> > 
> > it turned out to be my user error, but I'd like to note that the
> > configuration of all this is, requiring the coordinated use of
> > qtconfig-qt3 and the fonts configuration option in psi highly
> > unintuitive (imho). I don't know where this is explained, too.
> 
> Could you write some lines explaining how you configured psi to
> display these fonts well? Then I could add it as a readme to to
> /usr/share/doc/psi/.
> 
> BTW, sorry that I wasn't able to help you with this issue, I'm only
> using characters available in latin1, so most programs just work in that
> regard.

below is a quick run-down from memory. It's been a while since I did
it, and I'm currently not in the mood for experimenting too much (and
rather time-constrained, too).

I have  de_DE.utf8 as my standard language environment. This is
probably important because I guess that when you are using non-UTF8
locales, your results will differ by a LARGE margin.

Next, one needs an input method because chinese glyphs can't be
directly typed (~50.000 against ~100 keys... go figure). I use scim,
and I implemented the "Smart Pinyin" input method (and would like help
with other methods).

One also needs all fonts that one can grab. The names of the font
packages don't readily suggest which fonts are in them, and the only
font I found working well enough for me seems to be "AR PL ShanHeiSun
Uni". I don't know which package contains it, however. I also don't
know which other font and/or input method I'd have to choose if I
wanted to write Traditional Chinese... help appreciated!

Next, fire up qtconfig-qt3 (because psi is a qt3 program), go to the
tab labelled 'Fonts', and select a font. I selected "Sans Serif" as my
default font because I usually use western fonts. Then select the "Sans
Serif" family in the drop-down menu labelled "Select or Enter a
Family". Then, go to the bottom of that pane and select the font "AR PL
ShanHeiSun Uni" in the drop-down menu labelled "Select substitude
Family". In psi, you also select "Sans Serif" as your standard font.

As far as I understood, this results in psi (or any other qt3
application) looking for a glyph it cannot display using the standard
font, will look into the substitution table and try to take the glyphs
from the fonts listed there, in order. But you need to match your font
settings in psi with the font settings in qtconfig-qt3 in order to make
qt3 look up the correct subsitutions for you. Eg it should be possible
to replace all occurrences of "Sans Serif" with "Times".

I don't know how to do this with other non-latin fonts, however. Also,
the idea of using qtconfig-qt3 was not mine. It was suggested to me by
someone who had a similar problem in the past.
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