Since upgrading to Xubuntu Edgy I have been having some annoying issues with Chinese fonts.
Some of the characters appear thin, whilst others look quite good. Then some don’t even appear properly at all.
The problem appears in all applications; mousepad, thunar, firefox, etc.
But then sometimes, Firefox display the characters perfect.
It is exactly the same problem that one fellow was plagued with using Dapper, however for me the fonts looked great on Dapper.
It appears that people have been having problems with fonts in general in Edgy, but their issues are not apparent for me. I may not be alone any longer. This person on the Ubuntu forums appears to have the same problem too.
Very annoying.
Yes. I am having the same problem with KDE as well. Using Kubuntu 6.10
Funny, SUSE Linux 10.1 doesn’t have this problem.
Interesting. I wonder what SUSE uses that Edgy doesn’t?
I also have been having problems with fonts in general now.
Did you ever figure out a work around?
Thanks,
-J
Yes and No.
I installed some better Chinese fonts; ttf-arphic-bsmi00lp, ttf-arphic-gbsn00lp, ttf-arphic-ukai and ttf-arphic-uming for writing.
The characters look fine when using these fonts, but still look poor when using other fonts.
Around the PC (File manager, browser, etc) they still look bad with ordinary fonts … I didn’t want to use the Chinese fonts across my whole computer.
It didn’t use to be this way I’m sure …
The problem is that Ubuntu is configured to fall back to DejaVu Sans when a font doesn’t support a character. So all fonts that are not chinese will display their chinese characters with it. And since that font is basically a compilation of others the results aren’t pretty.
Fortunately, that can be fixed with a custom ~/.fonts.conf file. In the example below (I hope the xml will show in this post), I have configured the sans-serif fonts to display first Helvetica and then if the character isn’t found in it, it uses the chinese font, so I can still control which font is used for roman characters.
sans-serif
Helvetica
AR PL ZenKai Uni
You can have different configuration for different fonts, the possibilities are endless.
And the XML was indeed eaten by the blog script :/ So I’m trying again, I hope it works this time:
<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM “fonts.dtd”>
<fontconfig>
<alias>
<family>sans-serif</family>
<prefer>
<family>Helvetica</family>
<family>AR PL ZenKai Uni</family>
</prefer>
</alias>
</fontconfig>