For copyright restriction many Linux distributions and BSD releases only ship with opensource fonts. And afaik the "AR PL Kaiti GB" and "AR PL Songti GB" are the *only* scalable opensource fonts which contains simplified Chinese ideographs, and I have been using the two fonts all the years. These two fonts are released by arphic co. many years ago, and mean time they released correspoding fonts for Traditional Chinese encoded in Big 5, so they released 4 fonts: simplified Chinese Kaiti, simplified Chinese Songti, traditional Chinese Kaiti, traditional Chinese Mingti (Mingti is another way of saying Songti).
The first two fonts only contain GB2312 characters. Even a typical mainland users cannot avoid seeing simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese in a same page (and truly this happens a lot to me). I often set my mozilla to use the first two fonts, and I am not able to see traditional Chinese ideograph in simplified Chinese webpages. This kills me because my Chinese name contains a traditional Chinese ideograph (and two simplified Chinese ideograph), i cannot even see my full name on my homepage.
I wish I could start to merge these fonts: simplified Chinese Kaiti and traditional Chinese Kaiti into Chinese Kaiti, and simplified Chinese Songti, traditional Chinese Mingti into Chinese Songti, encode them into unicode and perhaps convert to type1 to allow wider use in Linux/BSD, and redistribute these fonts. Thanks its opensource I am allowed to do it.
The questions:
1) does this make sense at all? I must not be the first one who has this problem and I wonder do other people has better method to workaround? (I know about fontconfig but that require the end user be able to configure fontconfig, and I think distribute a font without modifying fontconfig would make other user feel more confortable.)
2) If this is a good thing to do, do you think it's difficult? What tool do I need to research / use?
3) Is it a good idea to distribute the font in type1? I am not sure but truetype font seems not being supported by many applications, and I never successfully made my tcl/tk and motif apps to use truetype Chinese font.
Thank you!
