[tlug] Re: Pretty Japanese font for latex-cjk beamer presentation

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

John Fremlin writes:

 > > but the only free scalable Japanese fonts I know of that are
 > > universally distributed are the Wadalab (sometimes called Watanabe)
 > > fonts, and they're pretty low quality.
 > 
 > So I guess the J in CJK Latex is a bit sketchy.

No, it's not LaTeX's responsibility to provide fonts.  There are
actually a lot of nice Japanese fonts available, you just have to pay
for them (turns out this is not quite true, see below), and you're not
allowed to redistribute them.  As usual, Japanese LaTeX looks an order
of magnitude (or three) better than output from MS Wart or
Itchy-tar(o), given the same quality of fonts.

 > > I think that Adobe at least will use its own fonts rather than
 > > embedded fonts when viewing, but I'm not sure of that.
 > 
 > Why do you imagine that Acrobat Reader will substitute embedded fonts?
 > 
 > Font substitution is only necessary for fonts which are not embedded, as
 > I understand it(?)

The embedded fonts are not necessarily what the document specifies.

Anyway, I've taken a look at the PDF file.  Yep, those are the Wadalab
fonts, or maybe derivatives like Sazanami or Kochi.  You need to get
nicer fonts.  Apparently there are the "IPA fonts" that are freely
available, and the Cyberbit fonts are apparently OK.  Installation may
or may not be trivial; IPA is available as an ebuild on Gentoo, but
Cyberbit doesn't seem to be there.  A recent version (Unicode 4.0
conformance -- but not a full repertoire! -- is claimed) of Cyberbit is
here:

http://titus.fkidg1.uni-frankfurt.de/unicode/tituut.asp

and an older one (Unicode 2.0 conforming) here:

http://http.netscape.com.edgesuite.net/pub/communicator/extras/fonts/windows/

Here's a pretty intelligible resource on configuring TeX:

http://www-alg.ist.hokudai.ac.jp/~jan/japfonts.html

HTH!

Steve