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Chinese support for Linux

Graphical Environments, Managers, Multimedia & Desktop questions.
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clinux

Chinese support for Linux

#1 Post by clinux »

As seen on http://www.jsxblog.uni.cc/item/191
Six years ago, when I started to know Linux, Chinese support was awful. It seemed that the work displaying, inputing and printing Chinese in Linux had just started, because all GUI packages in Linux have to be patched to support Chinese, and a distribution called CLE (Chinese Linux Extension) is popular among chinese linux users. The so-called Chinese Linux cannot differenciate two-byte chinese characters from one-byte ASCII characters. Therefore, irrecognisable characters, or luan4ma3 in chinese, often occured.

It's a good news that Linux started to support Unicode, and localisation became an important to-do work for every software that runs on Linux. Thanks to the volunteers working on Chinese Linux previously, displaying, inputing and printing Chinese in Linux is no more a problem.

But for Chinese Users who uses Chinese everyday, won't be satisfied for this succession. There are much more things to be done to fulfill everyday use. Below are the problems I faced when I am using Linux. Font problems.

1. Fonts supporting UCS: thanks to Arphic the fontmaker, four fonts (AR PL KaitiM Big5, AR PL KaitiM GB, AR PL Mingti2L Big5 and AR PL Sungti2L GB) is included in every Linux Distros. But it's a bit too little. For each of them contain only characters of their own charset, that is, Big5 fonts contain only Big5 charset (Traditional Writing Form) and GB fonts contain only GB charset (Simplified Writing Form), whereas MIcrosoft's PMingLIU and SimSun has the whole CJK charset. Thus, those fonts is outdated in the Unicode world. Overseas Chinese users who are not living in either Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan uses both writing forms at the same time in the cyberworld. Sometimes you could see them both in a same essay. (And Mainland China users may need to read essays from Taiwan, Macau, or Hong Kong, or the other way round as well) In these cases, the Arphic fonts will seem insufficient. Chinese Linux users need some font supporting the whole UCS. Some users may copy the PMingLIU and SimSun from Windows but in terms of law, Microsoft won't let you do that.

2. Fake Bolds and Italics: The Chinese characters amount are so huge (a "good" font often takes tens of Megabytes, an ordinary one still takes 1 or 2 Megabytes, comparing to Latin-letter fonts which takes only a few hundred Kilobytes) that making another Bold or Italic "siblings" for a Chinese font is impossible. In Windows and Mac OS X, displaying bolds and italics is archived using some line of code, which is called "Fake Bolds" and "Fake Italics". When the same font is used in Linux, they lose the bold and italic features. Chinese Linux users rely on the patch made by (alias) firefly, and applying the patch is a tough job.

3. Displaying Chinese Font Names: Every Chinese Font in the market has their own Chinese fonts names, however, not all of them have English names. When Linux Fontserver failed to detect English names, they will come back to display the Chinese names, however, they come out with unrecognisable characters. It is some kind of visual pollution. Also, most Chinese users will be happy to see Chinese fonts displayed in Chinese names, even if they have English font names.

These are the main reason I still treat Desktop Linux as a toy rather than consider to switch to it seriously (but using Linux as a server is quite mature and this site is hosted using my own computer, using Debian Sarge). I guess most Chinese users have the same opinion too. Linux is still an immature Desktop OS in the Chinese market.

lacek
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Joined: 2004-03-11 18:49
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#2 Post by lacek »

Do you have any questions here, or you just jumped in to cry down Linux a little bit?

clinux

#3 Post by clinux »

well... i hope someone could help

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