Re: [gtk-i18n-list] Far Eastern fonts for embedded Linux

[mpsuzuki hiroshima-u ac jp]

Hi,

On Tue, 17 Jul 2007 10:54:30 -0500
"Boncek, John" <jboncek hunter com> wrote:
>I am looking for Chinese, Korean, and Thai fonts for embedded
>applications.  Memory is tight -- I have about 10 megabytes
>total to spend on these.

10 megabytes is quite tight restriction. I recommend you
to consider the subsetting of CJK ideographs to each
localization.

>                         Screen space is also limited, so
>fonts that are legible at less than 20 pixels or so total height
>would be desirable.  The applications run in Linux with GTK
>and Pango using the Unicode encoding UTF-8.
>Can you recommend any suitable fonts?

Please take a look on "Wen Quen Yi" http://wqy.sourceforge.net/
it is GPLed. Their goal is to provide a font covering
all CJKV ideographs, additional CJK characters (Bopomofo,
Hiragana/Katakana and precomposed Hangul), so their font
is quite huge. The size of TrueType font (without bitmap)
is 16MB. Also they provide bitmap only font: the size of
16x16 pixel font is 3MB in pcf format (if in pcf.gz, it is
reduced to 844KB).
As an example of subsetted case, I take "fansong ti"
(gb16fs.pcf in X11): its coverage is GB2312 (the most basic
 character set in PRC), the size in pcf.gz is 247KB.
Anyway, I think WQY product is good starting point than
collecting various CJK fonts for various coverage.

# In addition, I'm not sure if the designs of non-ideographs
# (e.g. Hiragana/Katakana and Hangul) in WQY are easy for
# native users for each scripts.

>TrueType fonts are usable in this system. If you know of any
>other type of fonts that are usable in Linux, that would be OK
>too.

Although FreeType2 is completely capable to handle WQY fonts,
fontconfig cannot handle bitmap-only TTF or PCF, as you know.

--

About Thai scripts, I have no idea on particular fonts to
recommend. Linux TLE (Thai Language Environment) project
may have some free fonts for the screen of desktop PC, but
I'm not sure bitmap font is used.

Regards,
mpsuzuki