All I want to do is read Chinese in Firefox/KDE. I have a clean full install of Slackware 10.2, with all the KDEI packages. Chinese characters appear as boxes.

I thought it might be a firefox problem, but when I go to Control Center> Regional & Accessibility> Country/Region & Language and change the language from US English to Simplified Chinese, I get the same boxes.

Additionally, Firefox correctly detects Chinese pages. When I visit www.zaobao.com, Firefox> View> Character Encoding> correctly detects Chinese Simplified GB2312, but displays the page as boxes.

What settings must I change or additional fonts must I install? It has been suggested elsewhere that fonts might solve the problem but it seems a little odd and inelegant that I would have to do that since I've already installed the language packages from KDEI (including Simplified Chinese, kde-i18n-zh_CN-3.4.2-noarch-1.tgz)

I'm retarded. I got the Truetype fonts from Fedora:

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pu...-10.noarch.rpm
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pu...-28.noarch.rpm

got the fonts out of those pesky rpms, put them in /usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/TTF and ran fc-cache


Now the question is, why would Slackware be distributed with the KDE locales but without the fonts?

My guess is that the Slackware maintainers want to keep the distro size as small as possible and including every possible unicode font out there would bloat it up big time without really providing a great deal for a majority of users. I'm sure that you can get the fonts through other means, though like 3rd party packages or sources.