Hello debian-installer developers,
Frans Pop asked me to look at this discussion about CJK fonts in g-i and
send my comments as the initial font change (Arphic TTF to wqy bitmap)
was my suggestion. I appreciate his considerateness and am very happy
to do so.
So I looked at the screeshots made by Attilio Fiandrotti [1,2] based on
Kenshi Muto's suggestion. The Chinese screenshot looks reasonably good
except one big problem - the second character for the second choice,
Taiwan, is missing. It should be "台湾", but only the fisrt character
is shown.
The screenshots from Hidetaka Iwai [3,4] using embedded bitmap font for
Chinese looks better than the one above, and all characters are good.
It doesn't look like 12pt (which is 16x16 pixels for the bitmaps in
xfonts-wqy) as claimed though, but more like 9pt (12x12) or 10pt
(13x13).
I don't know enough about d-i to have an opinion on how to handle the
fonts in GTK+ frontend, but I'm willing to review screenshots and/or
test isos. I lack the expertise and time to build iso by my own,
though. A general opinion among the Chinese (at least simplified
Chinese) users, as far as I see, is that bitmap fonts look nicer than
Truetype fonts at small size，due to the complex shapes of most Chinese
characters. So please keep using bitmap fonts (either stand-alone or
embedded in TrueType fonts) for Chinese if possible.
I'd also like to ask for a favor from people generating screenshots for
Chinese. As zh_CN and zh_TW are practially two different locales (as
different as ja and ko are), and has different legacy encodings
(therefore often different fonts), please post screenshots for both.
The screenshot in [2] only has the zh_CN one, while the one in [4] only
has the zh_TW one, so I can't really know how it looks for the other
locale.