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 _______________________________________________ users mailing list users@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users
