Re: Chinese Traditional appearance -- mixed weights?

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Wed, 2006-09-27 at 16:47 -0500, Boncek, John wrote:
> Attached is a screen shot of a screen generated using Pango with GTK 2.2.4
> in Chinese Traditional.  Does the Chinese look correct?  We currently have
> no one who reads Chinese, but it looks to us like we're getting mixed
> weights (boldness) 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?  The selected
> language using pango_context_set_language is "zh"; the behavior is the
> same using the more specific "zh-TW".  Appearance at larger font sizes or
> in other languages including Chinese Simplified is much more uniform.  I
> tried installing the AR PL New Sung font recommended at
> http://www.unifont.org/fontguide/ and placed it ahead of all other fonts
> in all the lists in my fonts.conf file and it seemed to make no
> difference.  Any suggestions would be appreciated.

It's really hard to comment on versions of GTK+ and Pango that were
released over 3 years ago (effectively more like 4, since 2.2.0 was
released in Dec 2002, and 2.2.4 is just a bug-fix of that); I have
trouble even remembering what font systems were supported at that time.

The screenshots show multiple fonts mixed together. If you:

 a) Have your text tagged with the language zh-tw
 b) Have some font on your system that fontconfig identifies as
    zh-tw ('fc-list :lang=zh-tw')
 c) Have not explicitly specified a Simplified Chinese or Japanese
    font for the text

That won't happen

But maybe you are using X core fonts? Maybe you are using a
pre-fontconfig version of Xft? 
					- Owen