Fedora core Chinese font support

Mike A. Harris mharris at mharris.ca
Tue Oct 10 19:20:26 UTC 2006


Leo wrote:
> On Tue, 10/10/06 14:50 +0100, Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
>> On Tue, 2006-10-10 at 12:55 +0100, Leo wrote:
>>> On Tue, 10/10/06 11:17 +0100, Yuan Yijun wrote:
>>>
>>>> 2006/10/9, Leo <sdl.web at gmail.com>:
>>>>> FZSongTi, 方正宋体, which is a commercial font.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Tweaking font needs some expertise on fontconfig, xft and
>>>>> freetype. It's not a task for end users. I hope fedora come with a
>>>>> better Chinese font support.
>>>>>
>>>> chinese fonts in fc6 has changed a lot from fc5, the look and feel has
>>>> been improved so much that you have never seen in other distributions.
>>>> please compare fc6 to novell again after fc6 released.
>>>>
>>>> -- 
>>>> bbbush ^_^
>>> I probably can do it for FC7. I have no plan to upgrade to FC6 since
>>> I'm stuck with a lot of work at this time. But what on earth has
>>> changed from FC6 to FC5 with respect to Chinese fonts? Is it the new
>>> fontconfig or a new CJK font? Is it possible to backport those to FC5?
>> The most likely candidate for a big improvement in this area is 
>> a newer version of FreeType. Recent versions of FreeType contain
>> specific code for auto-hinting CJK fonts. (A version of this code
>> has apparently been in SuSE for a while as a patch.)
>>
>> 					- Owen
>>
>> [ This is just a guess - I haven't checked the FreeType version in FC6
>>   or looked at FC5 / FC6 comparisons for font quality. ]
> 
> This makes sense to me.
> 
> I have checked the Release Notes and Changelog of Freetype 2.1.10 to
> 2.2.1 and it seems to me it is very safe to upgrade. Here is from the
> Release notes
> 
>       Note that, as  a convenience to our Unix  desktop users, version
>       2.2 is *binary* compatible with FreeType 2.1.7, which means that
>       installing this  release on  an existing distribution  shall not
>       break any working desktop.
> 
> Should we consider issuing an update for FC5?

Freetype has been notorious for not keeping compatibility with itself
from one *minor* release to the next, let alone a major release.  Even
if it claims to be compatible, having watched freetype development
from the sidelines for 5+ years, and seeing various bug reports hit
bugzilla.redhat.com et al. I would hope that such an update wouldn't
just get blindly pushed as an FC5 update.

Since FC6 will be out within a week or so hopefully, it would be better
for the wider Fedora community to leave the freetype in FC5 alone, and
users who want the new functionality can either upgrade to FC6, or can
manually upgrade freetype to the one from FC6 themselves.




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