lack of Chinese fonts

[kurain]

There are no default Chinese fonts in Haiku. This makes it very hard for Chinese users to use or test Haiku. So it is necessary to port some Chinese fonts under some free license to haiku.

[kurain]

I have used some other open OS like different linux releases. They have some default Chinese fonts, and all these fonts are under GPL license, which is I am caring about. I don't whether the fonts under GPL could be accepted by Haiku project under MIT license. these fonts are a series of fonts,below is the website of this project---http://wenq.org/enindex.cgi(this is its English page).

this series of fonts have been used for so long time by so many open projects, so it's relatively stable and acceptable. And it is still being developed by many people, it will be of great help to Haiku project.

[xeon3d]

Fixed Link: ​English Project Page

In addition, there are more open-sourced fonts here listed with their respective license:

• ​Myuppy - ​Eclipse Public License 1.0
• ​Various Chinese Fonts - ​GPL v2

[pulkomandy]

I just found this page : ​http://www.unifont.org/fontguide/ It may or may not be interesting, but there is a list of font with various licences that could fit us.

[kurain]

I have tested that nightly build haiku has support Chinese. but when showing Chinese names of files or file folders, haiku couldn't give a complete name. And when showing Chinese documents in text files, it just show "?" in a small black diamond everywhere. so I want to know which fonts are you using, and that kind of Chinese fonts may not be complete. Maybe we have to test some other Chinese fonts.

[dru_ed]

Kurain recommends this font:

​http://sourceforge.net/projects/wqy/files/wqy-microhei/

It is GPL licensed with font embedding exception per the included README. The Apache license is included as well because Droid fonts are used as "fallback."

​http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#FontException

As a special exception, if you create a document which uses this font, and embed this font or unaltered portions of this font into the document, this font does not by itself cause the resulting document to be covered by the GNU General Public License. This exception does not however invalidate any other reasons why the document might be covered by the GNU General Public License. If you modify this font, you may extend this exception to your version of the font, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version.

[Disreali]

I just found a fontset that include Chinese characters that was made for BeOS/Zeta/Haiku.

​http://www.masuseki.com/index.php?u=be/konatu.htm

It works well.

[Disreali]

It is a Japanese fontset and the page is Japanese.

Google translate link below:

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=ja&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.masuseki.com%2Findex.php%3Fu%3Dbe%2Fkonatu.htm

[citi324]

Replying to Disreali:

I just found a fontset that include Chinese characters that was made for BeOS/Zeta/Haiku.

​http://www.masuseki.com/index.php?u=be/konatu.htm

Konatsu is a Japanese font, so it is very unlikely that it is adequate to display Chinese.

[scottmc]

Can you check these fonts and see if one or more of them contains the full Chinese set needed. ​http://ports-space.haiku-files.org/media-fonts/

[Disreali]

More Chinese fonts to test:

​http://www.sino.uni-heidelberg.de/edv/sinopc/chinese_fonts.htm

​http://www.clearchinese.com/resources/fonts.htm

​http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_ChineseTraditional.html

​http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/fonts.htm

[kurain]

the droid fonts may include Chinese fonts, for I know that Wen Quan Yi Micro Hei font[1] is based on it. so I still adviced that we use Wen Quan Yi fonts by default, which is beautiful and licensed under Apache2.0 or GPLv3 .

[1] the release notes: ​http://wenq.org/index.cgi?MicroHei_BigBang_README

[scottmc]

Looks like the wqy-microhei font will work for this: ​http://ports-space.haiku-files.org/media-fonts/ wqy-microhei-0.2.0-beta-x86-gcc2-2011-02-16.zip

[mmadia]

Fixed in hrev40673. For builds other than @alpha-*, WQY-MicroHei needs to be added either through UserBuildConfig or via installoptionalpackage .

Please reopen if this font does not support the charset as expected. Thanks!

[mmadia]

As Stephan mentioned on the commit list, The user has to select the font, though, before switching to Chinese. I don't really consider the ticket fixed, yet, especially since you can switch to Chinese in ReadOnlyBootPrompt before being able to select another system font. The best short term solution would be to include the new font in the fall-back mapping inside app_server. I'd love some Chinese developer to send a patch for this. ​http://www.freelists.org/post/haiku-commits/r40673-haikutrunkbuildjam,1

[axeld]

We should either remove the non-working languages from ReadOnlyBootPrompt, or fix the font issue for alpha 3.

[scottmc]

Perhaps the default font for ReadOnlyBoot Prompt could be set to WQY-MicroHei, and if the user picks Chinese, Japanese or Korean, switch the system defaults to WQY-MicroHei.

[scottmc]

looks like this isn't going to be fixed in time for alpha3, so moving to next release milestone.

[leavengood]

This can probably be fixed by implementing a Dan0-like overlay preference tab in the Font prefs, as I talked about in ticket 6967.

[pulkomandy]

Closing this for now. Selecting the right font from locale is a different issue than not having a font at all.