No more shitty Chinese/Japanese display font

This is sort of a follow up to my previous blog post on fontconfig, and also part of my efforts in making the EeePC a simple-to-use and pretty (in my own view) PC.

With such a small screen and fonts, complicated Chinese characters will be rendered as unintelligible white space with black dots when using Sung/Ming fonts (宋体，明体). In this case, Gothic/Hei fonts (serif equivalent to East Asian font) are very readable as it is capable to be rendered even with small font sizes. In this case, WenQuanYi's Zen Hei is the best open source Gothic/HeiTi font (and I even highlighted it in one of my post).

For this setup, I make it more simplistic: Copy a good template which specifies preferred Latin fonts (e.g. /etc/fonts/conf.d/60-latin.conf in Debian) to ~/.fonts.conf. Once that's in place: paste <family>WenQuanYi Zen Hei</family> in each <prefer> section.

Once that's in place, execute `fc-cache -fv` and restart your applications, and TADA! browsing Chinese sites on Firefox has never been more enjoyable with unified and readable text :D.

No More Hard-to-Read Chinese Text!

NEWS: Currently the font is included in the Ubuntu Hardy Heron repository! Install the "ttf-wqy-zenhei" package

Recently I have been continually fine-tuning my Ubuntu to give me the best (i.e. most comfortable) environment for me to work with. One of the major quirks is the hard to read Chinese fonts, which is due to the fact that it's pretty hard to hint SongTi (宋体) fonts.

Somehow it's pretty surprising that Ubuntu's repositories doesn't come with HeiTi (黑体) or Chinese Gothic fonts, which has thicker strokes. But luckily there's this open source, GPL'ed font foundary, Wen Quan Yi, which does provide their HeiTi variant called "Zen Hei". Basically what I do is grab the package, install the Debian package (execute `dpkg --install wqy-zenhei-0.2.15-1.deb`), adding the configuration to match the font in my /etc/fonts/local.conf file (see my previous article for details) and lastly execute `sudo fc-cache -fv`.

Once I done that and restart my applications, now I had 100% reliable and perfectly readable Chinese pages! :D