Re: Chinese Simplified appearance

["Edward H. Trager" <ehtrager umich edu>]

Hi, John and Everyone, 

As another respondant has correctly stated, you can get very good display
of Chinese on modern Linux.  Actually, you can get excellent display.
In addition to Owen Taylor's suggestions below,
you just need to have good fonts (and of course you can tell Pango to use those
good fonts.  You can also setup your fontconfig configuration to default to those
good fonts for CJK.)

So, what are the good fonts?  I highly recommend Debian Taiwan's
"Unifonts" project which has taken two CJK font styles graciously donated to
the Open Source community by Arphic Technologies and recoded these into 
Unicode-based TrueType fonts:

    1. AR PL ShanHeiSun Unicode
    2. AR PL ZenKai Unicode

    http://tavi.debian.org.tw/index.php?page=Unifonts

 Arne Götje (高盛華) has also add numerous additions
like extended bopomofo for Minnan and Hakka (台、客語) and they are working 
on the Hong Kong Supplemental Character Set (HKSCS -- 香港).  The Arphic license
is quite similar to the license for the Bitstream Vera fonts, so anyone can
use these fonts.  Please download the fonts and read the license yourselves
to see what you can do.

As these two fonts already have both
simplified (简体) and traditional (繁體) characters, with new Hong Kong Supplemental additions being 
added all the time, they represent a very good solution to all of your Chinese
display problems.

For screen shots of these fonts, and information on other high-quality fonts, CJK and otherwise,
for Open Source systems that may be useful to you now and in the future, please
refer to the following Unicode Font Guide for Free/Libre Open Source Operating Systems:

       http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/unicode/fontguide/

- Ed Trager


  
On Wednesday 2005.08.31 21:47:08 -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-08-31 at 15:26 -0500, Boncek, John wrote:
> > Attached is a screen shot of a screen we are generating using Pango
> > with GTK 2.2.4.  It is a print preview screen with the printout mostly
> > in Chinese Simplified.  Does the Chinese look correct?  It looks to us
> > like Pango may have selected different sizes or boldness of fonts for
> > different characters in the same line in many cases.  Does it do this
> > automatically when the selected font size doesn't have all the
> > characters, or is there some other problem?
> 
> To get good looking display of East Asian languages, you generally have
> to let the system know *which* language the text is. Otherwise, it will
> select a font character by character and unless your lucky and the
> right font happens to be first, you'll get this sort of ugly mix.
> 
> You can do that various ways:
> 
>  - Use the LANG environment variable
> 
>  - Use pango_context_set_language()
> 
>  - Use a language PangoAttribute 
> 
>  - Use <span lang='zh-cn'>[blah]</span> PangoMarkup
> 
> Regards,
> 					Owen
> 
> 
> 
> 
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