ttf-arphic-uming causes degradation in Japanese font rendering in firefox

[Bryan Donlan]

Binary package hint: ttf-arphic-uming

After upgrading to ttf-arphic-uming 0.2.20080216-0ubuntu1, Japanese characters are rendered with inconsistent fonts in firefox 2.0.0.12+2nobinonly+2-0ubuntu1.

Attached is a 'before' image of http://blog.nicovideo.jp/nicolumn/2008/02/000908.html

[Bryan Donlan (bdonlan)]

and here is what it looks like with ttf-arphic-uming installed

[Bryan Donlan (bdonlan)]

as you can see, the rendering of the kanji does not match the style of the nearby kana, and further is a bit hard to see with that greyish color.

[Arne Goetje (arnegoetje)]

This is on my radar. However, this is more a fontconfig configuration issue. As CJK share the same codepoints in Unicode and all free CJK fonts available in any Open Source distribution are incomplete in terms of CJK support, we will always have this problem. Either for Chinese, Japanese or Korean, depending on which font you set as default, the other scripts will look "degraded".
I will do some reshuffeling of the fontconfig config files to get a decent compromise. Meanwhile, removing /etc/fonts/conf.d/64-ttf-arphic-uming.conf should give you back the previous appearance.

[Bryan Donlan (bdonlan)]

> depending on which font you set as default

How would one set a default? I'm mostly interested in Japanese (I'm
studying the language), but Chinese and Korean I just like to have
around so I don't get placeholder marks.

[Arne Goetje (arnegoetje)]

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Bryan Donlan wrote:
>> depending on which font you set as default
>
> How would one set a default? I'm mostly interested in Japanese (I'm
> studying the language), but Chinese and Korean I just like to have
> around so I don't get placeholder marks.

The default is "sans-serif" for the desktop, which is an alias referring
to a list of preferred fonts for a global desktop.
Depending on how you set the list of preferred fonts, either a Chinese,
Japanese or Korean font gets higher priority over the others. This is
done in /etc/fonts/conf.d/ .
I assume you use a non-CJK desktop, probably the default en_US locale
setting according to your screenshots. For this case we cannot predict
if the user wants to have a Chinese, Japanese or Korean font as
preferred CJK font.
You can do this choice by yourself, by using language-selector to
install the Japanese language pack (I assume you have already done this)
and then use fontconfig-voodoo in a terminal window to set the default
CJK rendering to ja_JP.
However, as font and fontconfig reshuffeling is currently going on, this
might not work as expected until beta release and font rendering might
be suboptimal for CJK.

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[Arne Goetje (arnegoetje)]

does the solution presented here (using fontconfig-voodoo to set the font rendering preferences to ja_JP) solve your problem?

[Bryan Donlan (bdonlan)]

Hi, sorry for the long delay in replying. I've been running without ttf-arphic-* installed for a while, as fontconfig-voodoo tended to change some system fonts to be harder to read for english. I've reinstalled ubuntu lately on a new laptop, and found a much more severe bug - see #256254 - which renders firefox unusable at all on some sites (not just individual characters, but entire pages will be misrendered with the ttf-arphic-* fonts installed).

[Arne Goetje (arnegoetje)]

setting to invalid, since this is not a font bug, but a fontconfig configuration issue.