[hardy] Japanese 18px or smaller fonts are ugly

[Jun Kobayashi]

Binary package hint: fontconfig

Japanese fonts displayed in 18px or smaller are ugly.
This is because freetype hinting doesn't work well for Japanese small antialiased fonts.

I confirmed this issue with fontconfig 2.5.0-2ubuntu3.

[Jun Kobayashi (jkbys)]

I rewote /etc/fonts/conf.avail/29-language-selector-ja-jp.conf to fix this bug. Attaching.

[Jun Kobayashi (jkbys)]

I rewrote /etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-language-selector-ja-jp.conf also.
This is for using VL Gothic fonts added to main repository in recent days.

[Arne Goetje (arnegoetje)]

The attached fontconfig files have been submitted to bzr. New packages will be built from there.

The default sans-serif and monospace font for Japanese in Ubuntu is currently Kochi Gothic. Should it be replaced with VL Gothic, too?
How about Latin and other scripts. Is it preferred to use the Latin characters which come with the japanese Gothic fonts, or would it be better to prefer Bitstream Vera Sans and DejaVu Sans?

[Jun Kobayashi (jkbys)]

Thank you for your help, Arne.

The default sans-serif and monospace font for Japanese should be replaced with VL Gothic, IMO.
This is because Kochi is not under development anymore, meanwhile VL Gothic is under lasting improvement and has better level of visibility than Kochi.

And, it is preferred to use the Latin characters come with Japanese fonts. The Latin characters included in Japanese fonts are designed to match Japanese characters.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package language-selector - 0.3.2

---------------
language-selector (0.3.2) hardy; urgency=low

  [ Michael Vogt ]
  * LanguageSelector/qt/QtLanguageSelector.py:
    - fix another charackter encoding problem (LP: #203335)
    - fix warning dialog if we have broken packages

  [ Arne Goetje ]
  * fixes in the Japanese font configuration (LP: #202731)

 -- Michael Vogt <email address hidden> Tue, 18 Mar 2008 11:07:17 +0100