Sorry but I can't really vote on this (not enough knowledge).

If the vote is about including chinese/japanese/korean fonts by default (and 
their are under a compatible open source license) then +1 from me.

As for the details I trust you and our chinese/japanese/korean community to 
choose the best solution.

Thanks
-Vincent

On Nov 2, 2011, at 3:46 AM, Sergiu Dumitriu wrote:

> Hey community,
> 
> I spent some time trying to make PDF export work for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, 
> Korean) characters, and managed to get it working quite well.
> 
> Searching for some good open source fonts, I finally decided on the following:
> 
> - CJK Unifonts (Linux re-packaging of the Arphic fonts)
> - IPAGothic
> - Baekmuk
> 
> The first one comes in two variants, serif (a.k.a. ming or song) and script 
> (regular script, kai), and has good support for Chinese, with good, but not 
> complete, support for Japanese, and no support for Korean. It looks very good 
> in both variants, but we should decide on one of them. I uploaded samples on 
> http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-7106 to see how they would look.
> 
> ***
> Q1: Should Kai or Ming be used as the default export font for Chinese?
> ***
> 
> I'm far from being an expert here, but my opinion is that the Kai variant, 
> with it's handwritten look, is better suited for printed material. Still, 
> PDFs are also used on screen, be that a large computer monitor or a handheld 
> device, and on screen the legibility of the Ming variant is better. One 
> option that I like is to use Kai for normal text and Ming for tt/code 
> elements, as a kind of monospace.
> 
> The second font, IPAGothic, is centered on Japanese, so it has good support 
> for Japanese, some support for Chinese, and no support for Korean. It is a 
> sans-serif variant.
> 
> The third font, Baekmuk, brings support for Korean (laking from the other two 
> fonts), along with little support for some Chinese and Japanese characters. 
> This one comes in more variants, but only two are complete enough to be 
> considered, Batang as the serif equivalent, and Gulim as the sans-serif 
> equivalent.
> 
> ***
> Q2: Should Batang or Gulim be used for Korean?
> ***
> 
> My opinion is that the serif variant looks better on print, although less 
> readable. Still, I've seen Gulim much more often used in practice. I attached 
> two samples for this as well to the Jira issue.
> 
> ***
> Q3: Should the current FreeSerif font be used for non-CJK characters, or the 
> font face defined in the font specific to each language?
> ***
> 
> While I prefer FreeSerif for all English text, I've seen in practice that the 
> preferred solution is to use a bulkier font for numbers and latin characters.
> 
> ***
> Q4: Does italics/oblique make sense for CJK characters?
> ***
> 
> The concept of Italics is defined only for latin-like characters, and no font 
> provides support for italics CJK. Still, Firefox does render slanted 
> characters for CJK text inside <em>. FOP, the rendering engine used for 
> generating PDFs, does not have support for automatically slanting fonts that 
> don't provide an italics variant, and will insist on choosing a font that 
> comes in an italics variant. So, this means that by default any text that is 
> emphasized in the wiki will not be displayed in the PDF correctly (they would 
> appear as # characters). There is a simple solution, and that is to alter the 
> font file so that is says that both the regular and italic version of the 
> font are in the file. Another option is to actually provide an oblique 
> version of the font, which FontForge seems to be able to do quickly and with 
> good results. Still, this will double the size of the fonts, so I'd rather 
> not provide italic fonts if they don't actually make much sense for native 
> CJK users.
> 
> 
> Some other fonts that I looked at were:
> * the Droid font used in Android devices, which is a sans-serif font IMO not 
> suited for print; its advantage would be that it provides a unitary look for 
> all CJK languages, less good looking, but more legible
> * the Hanazono font, which has impressive support for all the characters in 
> CJK Unicode sets, but was created in a wiki way, so IMO it's not very 
> consistent throughout the whole spectrum, and not as esthetically looking as 
> the others
> 
> ***
> Q5: Should a less good looking, but smaller and more consistent font be used? 
> If yes, which one?
> ***
> 
> The Droid font is actually quite small compared to the others, and on smaller 
> font sizes it is more readable.
> 
> 
> I would really appreciate some feedback on this topic.
> -- 
> Sergiu Dumitriu
> http://purl.org/net/sergiu/
> _______________________________________________
> devs mailing list
> d...@xwiki.org
> http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

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