Re: [tlug] unicode font with czech and japanese characters

[Michal Hajek <hajek1@example.com>]

First of all - I have printed Font-Howto [1] and I am going to read it
soon. :) 
In the meatime some comments:

> fc-list :lang=ja:lang=cs

$ fc-list :lang=ja:lang=cs
Sazanami Mincho,さざなみ明朝:style=Mincho-Regular,Regular
Arial Unicode
MS:style=Regular,Normal,obyčejné,Standard,Κανονικά,Normaali,Normál,Normale,Standaard,Normalny,Обычный,Normálne,Navadno,Arrunta
Fixed:style=ko
Fixed:style=ja
$ 

This is a bit surprising. I guess there should be more than those 4
hits. I mean, there should be more fonts somewhere. So I should go and
install them on my system.  

Out of pure curiosity... how many hits do other people on the list have? 
(perhaps there are more than 4 fonts like that out there) 

I also wonder, if somebody is using Japanese fonts like those displayed
here _in_terminal_:
http://musashi.or.tv/aoyagikouzanfont.htm

That is, I am interested in fonts which look more like hand written than
machine written. 

> fc-list "" family style lang

piped to wc -l gives:
473

So it looks to me like I have a whole bunch of fonts which I do not use
at all and I do _not_ have those which I would like to use. 

> Yes.  You may also want to use the :dpi=100 (substitute a DPI
> corresponding to your monitor) parameter so that point sizes are
> sensible.

Thanks for pointing that out. I only add that the actual dpi could be
find with xdpyinfo.

> for i in 'Sazanami Mincho' 'Kochi Mincho'; do
>   xterm -fa "$i-20" -geometry 40x5 -e my-font-thing "$i" &
> done
> 
> where my-font-thing contains a shell script
> 
> #! /bin/sh
> 
> echo The font is $1
> echo ""
> echo "A string containing Japanese and Czech."

just a small tip for other possible users: add something to prevent
xterms from disapearing immediately after running through the
my-font-thing. I am sure there are better ways, but I personally lived
well with sleep command. 

While reading man xterm, I came across this option too: 
-cjk_width
           Set the cjkWidth resource to ‘‘true’’.  When turned on, charac‐
           ters  with  East  Asian Ambiguous (A) category in UTR 11 have a
           column width of 2.  Otherwise, they have a column width  of  1.
           This may be useful for some legacy CJK text terminal-based pro‐
           grams assuming box drawings and others to have a  column  width
           of  2.  It also should be turned on when you specify a TrueType
           CJK double-width (bi-width/monospace) font either with  -fa  at
           the   command  line  or  faceName  resource.   The  default  is
           ‘‘false’’

Sometimes the letters seemed to be spaced too widely on the screen. This is the case with
$ xterm -fa "Arial Unicode MS-11"
http://material.karlov.mff.cuni.cz/people/hajek/tlug/xterm-ariel.png
which can display japanese, but is too wide. To my surprise, -cjk_width had no effect (the same for +cjk_width). 

Another surprise was
$xterm -fa "Fixed:style=ja:dpi=100"
http://material.karlov.mff.cuni.cz/people/hajek/tlug/xterm-fa.png

which did not display Japanese. I cannot see why. 
"$xterm -fn fixed" can display japanese. 
http://material.karlov.mff.cuni.cz/people/hajek/tlug/xterm-fn.png

You may also notice that xterm -fn fixed produces somehow blurred characters.I guess this has to do with "fixeness" of the font. I thought true-type fonts should do better. That is, there seems to be some other factor. 

In man page I read:

-fn font
       This option specifies the font to be used for displaying normal
       text.  The default is fixed.

-fa pattern
      This  option  sets  the  pattern  for  fonts  selected from the
      FreeType library if support for that library was compiled  into
      xterm.   This corresponds to the faceName resource.  When a CJK
      double-width font is specified, you also need to  turn  on  the
      cjkWidth  resource.   See  also  the renderFont resource, which
      combines with this to determine whether FreeType fonts are ini‐
      tially active.


So there are two "fixed" fonts? One FreeType and one another? How confusing... After all this confusion, I posted my xorg.conf for reference here:
http://material.karlov.mff.cuni.cz/people/hajek/tlug/xorg.conf


I do not run xfs or xfstt (= x font servers). Till now I though it is not necessary, but now I am not sure. Well... more reading is perhaps ahead :)

[1] http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Font-HOWTO.html

Michal