Problem with Korean default font "Guseul"

[Masoris]

If you install Korean language pack in Ubuntu, Ubuntu will install a Korean font "Guseul" which is contained in ttf-alee package. This font has big problem. Run "Character Map" and select "Guseul" font, and click "Han"(Chinese Character). You'll see Hangul instead of Chinese Character. For example
"U+4E00" should be "一", but this font print Hangul "일" instead of Chinese character "一".

Other problem is this font is one of default Korean font in fontconfig. So firefox use it as default monospace font. It makes Ubuntu users cannot read Chinese character amongst Korean scripts.

So I contacted with alee who made this font, he/she said he/she added this feature on purpose, so it's not a bug. I discuss about this problem in Korean community, some people "Guseul" font has problem, because it print Hangul instead of Chinese character, so it should be removed amongst package of Korean fonts. Other people said it is feature of "Guseul" font, so it's not a bug. But all people agree with fontconfig should be fixed and change default Korean font on Ubuntu.

[Masoris (masoris)]

This is the screenshot.

[Masoris (masoris)]

You can read related thread in here: http://kldp.org/node/89240 (Korean)

[Hagen (hagenf)]

I can confirm that this is a very annoying bug when trying to read Chinese on a system with Korean as default language. It renders Chinese text in Firefox practically unreadable.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

Finally, in jaunty we did some cleanup. also i have packages for gtk and gnome-settings-daemon in my ppa with which you can set /desktop/gnome/font_rendering/antialiasing, /desktop/gnome/font_rendering/hinting and /desktop/gnome/font_rendering/rgba_order to "auto" ... doing that will make gnome honour your fontconfig.

so can you test jaunty with the packages from my ppa and give me a good fontconfig rule for your font? (e.g. Guseul).?

My archive is: https://edge.launchpad.net/~asac/+archive ... just add the jaunty lines to sources.list and run apt-get update and dist-upgrade ... then go to gconf-editor and set the keys from above to auto ... then tweak fontconfig and give me what you want ;). Thanks!

[Arne Goetje (arnegoetje)]

Which Korean font would you suggest as a replacement for "Guseul"

[Hagen (hagenf)]

I could reproduce the problem with the site "http://bing.search.daum.net/" in Firefox:

If you enter (or copy/paste) e.g. the Chinese character 是 into the search field, it is displayed as a Korean character, looking like 시. The problem seems to be that Firefox recognizes the site as Korean and therefore chooses a Korean font. But that font tries to transliterate Chinese characters into Korean, which in a multilingual situation (and IMHO in general) is a bad idea. It seems to me that all installed Korean fonts have this problem.

The only way I could get the right characters to be displayed was by selecting one of the Chinese fonts (e.g. ”AR PL UMing CN“) as the "Korean sans serif" font in Firefox. The Chinese fonts also render Korean, maybe not beautifully, but at least correctly.

I am not a font expert and don't know if changing the Korean default sans serif font to a Chinese font is a good idea or whether a suitable (i.e. non-transliterating) Korean font can be found.

[Arne Goetje (arnegoetje)]

I'm closing the language-selector task, since we don't use Guseul as the primary font for Korean anymore.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for fontconfig (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]