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.

--
________________.0.________________
The Way of the Chao-Pao! is strong.
http://tinyurl.com/382gmp
-----------.|.-----------

Yeah, Wen Quan Yi is a respectable font item.

Yeah, Wen Quan Yi is a respectable fonts item.

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

Responding to Eric Hameleers...
> 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.

I notice that this one has Mingti based on the firefly fonts, which
the Wen Quan Yi fonts were supposed to supercede as I recall. Have
you tried out the WQY fonts yet? I'm quite happy with them in
Firefox, so my needs are covered. (Plus, I'm not running Slack 12
yet.)

> 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.

Phew! That saved me some time then! :)

> 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.

I just object to anything associated with M$ on my system. 8(

> 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.

Then you might be needing more from your fonts than I do. I just
needed Firefox to render correct Hanzi instead of boxes with numbers
in them. Opera comes with Chinese fonts in it's package (I got the
"static" release), but the maximum size it not quite large enough for
my comfort. The largest WQY fonts rendered in Firefox are clearer
and a bit larger, and for me, acceptable. As I don't need Hanzi fonts
for my desktop I guess there may be other problems I'm not likely to
see.

Sorry I can't be of more use than this right now, and I hope you get
what you need sorted out.

--
________________.0.________________
The Way of the Chao-Pao! is strong.
http://tinyurl.com/382gmp
-----------.|.-----------