Re: Unicode TTF containing CJK?

[Mike Fabian <mfabian@example.com>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com> writes:

>     Marc> Many references to this font states that it is a Unicode
>     Marc> font but when I install the font, and get a listing of which
>     Marc> font's the file contained, it lists all iso8859 encodings.
> 
> Yep.  Unicode doesn't mean you're prohibited from subsetting.  This is
> especially important in fonts because it's entirely unclear what the
> Japanese equivalent of (say) Courier is.

But Marc tried the Bitstream Cyberbit font which certainly contains
the CJK characters, therefore Marc must have made a mistake when he
can't get the CJK characters. Probably he just needs to add a few
lines to fonts.scale, as I wrote in my last mail.

>     Marc> What other TTFs are available besides Cyberbit?  Commercial
>     Marc> and free?
> 
> I don't know of any other free TTFs with as much coverage as Cyberbit.

And Cyberbit isn't free either. You can still download it from several
places for free, but you cannot redistribute it. And you cannot
download it from Bitstream any more.

> AFAIK the GNU unifont is not available as TTF, it's X11 BDF.  The same
> is true for the X11 unifont for the xterm (if that's different from
> the GNU unifont, which I never did get clarified).

Yes, it's different. The GNU unifont is a proportional font and it
contains all its characters in a single font.  The 18 pixel X11
unifont useable for xterm is a monospaced font useful for terminals
and it is split into several parts:

Part containing the "normal width" characters (like the latin
characters):

    -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--18-120-100-100-c-90-iso10646-1

Part containing the Japanese "wide" characters (twice the width of the
latin characters):

    -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-ja-18-120-100-100-c-180-iso10646-1

Part containing the Korean "wide" characters (twice the width of the
latin characters):

    -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-ko-18-120-100-100-c-180-iso10646-1

If you start xterm like:

xterm -u8 -fn "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--18-120-100-100-c-90-iso10646-1"

it will automatically use the fonts containing the wide characters
when necessary.

It looks like the GNU unifont is not suitable for use in xterm (looks
strange, lots of empty space between the characters).  But the GNU
unifont can be used for example in KDE applications.  But in KDE
applications, I found no way to use the xterm unicode font, because
KDE seems to need a single font, and not a pair of a "normal width"
and "wide" font.

-- 
Mike Fabian   <mfabian@example.com>   http://www.suse.de/~mfabian
睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。