Re: Display of Chinese TTF Fonts

[Anthony Fok <foka@debian.org>]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 08:22:55AM +0800, Meng Liang wrote:
> By default, the small font size looks rather bad.  I don't know which ttf font 
> you are using.  If you are using simsun, mingliu, you can set the anti-alias 
> false for the size between 10~16.  They have bitmap font embeded.
> 
> The best solution maybe install the patches by firefly for fontconfig, 
> freetype and xft.  It can output the chinese font name and has many other 
> features.

Firefly's patch has been incorporated in Debian's libfreetype6 (2.1.7-2)
package back in January 2004.  However, fontconfig, xft, Mozilla etc.
aren't patched yet, and we will need to file the appropriate bug reports
to get them fixed.

Note that this progress is going to take a while.  The Firefly/Akito
CJK autohinting patch that I put in libfreetype6 2.1.7-2 may be causing
some Russian users big headaches because some of the popular fonts they
use are now rendered rather badly.  See:

	http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=230179

and especially the screenshot at:

	http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi/Screenshot.png?bug=230179&msg=12&att=1

So yes, it may be a while before these patches make it to all their
respective upstream source trees and to Debian packages.  Meanwhile,
I heard that  http://debian.ustc.edu.cn/  have these packaged.  I
haven't tried them myself, but feel free to try them out.  :-)

Cheers,

Anthony