Mike wrote:
> For the record (so folks can search/find this info)...
>
> After spending an afternoon digging around for various solutions to
> seeing boxes with numbers in them for Chinese fonts in Firefox, and
> finding not much more than "Just copy Micro$erfeds fonts" advice, I
> got fed up and demanded of Google "I want OPEN SOURCE!"
>
> I got the "WenQuanYi Bitmap Song CJK Font" project.
> http://wqy.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/e...?BitmapSong_en
>
> I found a simple quick-cheat to getting these fonts operational for
> a single user.
> (See the package included instructions for a full system install)
>
> 1: Download the fonts (I used wqy-bitmapfont-pcf-0.9.9-0.tar.gz)
> 2: tar zxvf wqy-bitmapfont*.tar.gz
> 3: copy the wenquanyi*.pcf files to ~/.fonts/ (create if required)
> 4: also copy the 85-wqy-bitmapsong.conf file to ~/.fonts/
> 5: Add "<dir>~/.fonts/</dir>" to .fonts.conf (create if required)
>
> Then just restart X and Firefox.
>
>
> Hope this is of some use to somebody somewhere sometime.
>
Hi!

Could you please try this font package:
http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slac...-arphic-uming/ and tell
me what you find about the quality of the font. To me it made a huge
difference in how chinese web sites look in my browser - there is
chinese character support in the default Slackware font but it is not
at all comparable to a good Chinese TTF font.

The Wen Quan Yi font is not as easy to package since it will break
whenever you run fc-cache (which is at every boot) unless you install
the font in your homedirectory, like you did.

Indeed, people tell me all the time that only the Microsoft fonts look
good for Chinese, but that also implies that you have to recompile the
freetype package with an enabled bytecode interpreter and subpixel
rendering - and that is something which will never go into Slackware
because of the patents that lie with Apple and Microsoft.

So, I am interested in anything that makes a Chinese desktop look
good, with crisp fonts, while not having to revert to using non-free
stuff.

For Slackware 12.0 you also need
http://www.slackware.com/~alien/sas/...-2_slack12.tgz
because the libXft package in Slackware 12.0 was not recompiled
against the freetype lib that is part of Slackware 12.0. Without the
patched libXft package, Chinese web pages don't look nearly as good.

The libXft package has been fixed in slackware-current btw.

Cheers, Eric