installing Chinese fonts (rpm?) in RedHat Enterprise Workstation 4 update 1 x86

mattie_linux · 01-04-2006, 07:27 PM

Hello there,

(I apologize for any English mistakes.)

Though Firefox seems to correctly detect the right
encoding, I am getting a strange characters in place
of (Chinese) text on the Chinese sites I visit.

I think I am just missing the Chinese fonts rpm. Is
"taipeifonts-1.2-26.noarch.rpm" my only option? When I
"ls" all the RPM's in the distro, and grep for "-i
chinese," the only things that come up are:

- kde-i18n-Chinese-3.3.1-2.1.noarch.rpm
- kde-i18n-Chinese-Big5-3.3.1-2.1.noarch.rpm
( Which would be seemingly be KDE related?)

I did install "taipeifonts-1.2-26.noarch.rpm" (from
the Redhat media), but I'm still not getting Chinese
pages to look right. Did I choose the wrong font
package, or maybe I have the wrong approach
altogether?

thanks,
Mats

TruongAn · 01-04-2006, 11:43 PM

I am learning Chinese, so I don't know how chinese user deal with the fonts problem.
But my computer display chinese character correctly using Unicode fonts.
It may help if you are using the unicode encoding.
Those unicode fonts can be found inside windows, copy these six fonts:

Code:

Times New Roman
Tahoma
Arial Unicode MS
Verdana
Palatino Linotype

I am not sure whether those fonts can be copy freely.
But if M$ hold its copyright, they must have something done to prevent we copy it.

So, you can try it if you want.

ztdep · 01-10-2006, 06:25 AM

hi , copy those fonts to whick location

T.Hsu · 01-10-2006, 07:16 AM

There are many choices, Arphic release some fonts under APL for free, most distro use them as default Chinese fonts, but their display effect is inferior to MingLiu -- the default font in Traditinal Chinese Windows system, due to lack of embeded bitmap font, but using MingLiu might have copy right violation. Recently, Taiwan hacker Firefly made a good free font, partly based on Arphic fonts, but have bitmap font embeded, and this part is made by Firefly from scratch. You can get them at:

http://cle.linux.org.tw/fonts/FireFly/

As for fonts installation, rpm is not the only way, you can just copy the ttf file to a directory listed in the /etc/fonts.conf.

grep \<dir\> /etc/fonts.conf

to check the correct path.

then run fc-cache -fv to update the fonts cache, optionally restart the X session.

Note, the above procedure is for the fontconfig font subsystem, which gtk2 and qt use. Linux have two font subsystems, another is the core X font system, classic application such ass xmms (gtk1), many window manager, etc, use it. To ensure the core X font system can use those newly installed truetype fonts, you should first load the freetype module in X config file, /etc/X11/XFree86.conf for xfree86, /etc/X11/xorg.conf for xorg, check if the following line exists in above files:

Code:

  Load        "freetype"

then add the directory path in which those fonts exist in to the X config file, for example, you copy the ttf file to /usr/share/fonts/, then add

Code:

FontPath        "/usr/share/fonts"

to the X config file, then cd into the fonts directory, run

Code:

mkfontscale && cp fonts.scale fonts.dir

restart X.

But there is a problem, mkfontscale comes with xorg seems can't recognize Chinese fonts encoding properly, thus generates wrong useless fonts.dir and fonts.scale, which don't contain valid XLFD (X Logical Font Descriptions) for Chinese fonts. I test it for MingLiu and SimSun, it cannot generate BIG5 XLFD for MingLiu and GBK XLFD for SimSun.

Some useful commands to check if font is properly installed:

fc-list : list available fonts for the fontconfig system
xlsfonts : list available fonts for the core X font system