CJK characters together with the Ubuntu font look ugly

[Jonas Ådahl]

When including CJK characters in text where the Ubuntu font is used, such as filenames in Nautilus file manager in gnome, and other places, the CJK characters are not rendered with anti aliasing enabled.

Screenshot of font-manager displaying the combination of CJK characters and western using the Ubuntu font: http://ubuntuone.com/p/OKG/

and a screenshot of the same text but using another font where CJK characters are displayed more beautifully: http://ubuntuone.com/p/OKF/ (in this case FreeSans)

I have tested with Ubuntu 10.10 (upgraded from 10.04).

[Matteo Rapone (nedanfor)]

Ubuntu Font Family simply doesn't cover CJK and what you see is another font. Here you can see the UFF coverage: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Ubuntu%20Font%20Family#Coverage

If you want to request coverage for CJK script, see here: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-font-family/+milestone/later

PS. FreeSans covers CJK.

[Jonas Ådahl (jadahl)]

I see. Thanks for the reply. Is it possible to configure Ubuntu to use some better fallback font for CJK? I'm not aware of the inner details about how font selection work, but this problem started after upgrading to 10.10. Where would such a bug be reported to, or can this bug be moved there instead?

[Matteo Rapone (nedanfor)]

I think it's possible to change current configuration with fontconfig but I am not sure about it. I don't know where this bug should be moved, I hope someone more experienced than me can help you.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Unfortunately, with the Ubuntu One shutdown, those screenshot links no longer work.

As far as I can tell, fontconfig lets you specify a fallback font order for sans-serif fonts in general, but not for the Ubuntu font in particular.
<https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/fonts#Fallback_font_order_with_X11>
<http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Fontconfig#Custom_system_wide_configuration>

So there is nothing the Ubuntu font, specifically, can do to fall back to a better font when you use CJK characters. Given that, this seems to be just a duplicate of bug 655128 for adding CJK characters to the Ubuntu font itself.