Comment 22 for bug 206018

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Wenzhuo Zhang wrote:
> OK, let me summarize my arguments agaist using Zen Hei as the default
> Chinese font under current circumstances:
>
> 1. Blurry strokes of truetype fonts.

If you turn off anti-aliasing, the strokes will look much uglier,
because the fonts don't contain hints and the autohinter is doing a bad
job on CJK fonts. Also the embedded bitmap glyphs are enforced for 9pt
to 12pt size. Therefor the is only blurry for sizes <9pt and >12pt. But
it looks better than with anti-aliasing turned off.

> 2. Missing 14px bitmap font.

Has been solved with the latest update. 13px fonts are used instead,
which is what you also see in UMing. In fact, 11/12px, 13/14px and
15/16px are the same.

> 3. No pre-designed bold face, and either xft or freetype make a mess of the strokes of complex and not-so-complex characters.

None of the CJK fonts available has pre-designed bold faces. So the
rendering issue applies to all of them.

> 4. Ubuntu has come a long way to achieve the visual effect of Chinese characters as seen in Gutsy and Hardy beta Desktop CD, which is already quite satisfactory (I think). No need to make radical changes at present, which is seemingly a step backward.

At that time no other decent font was available. But I always disliked
to have UMing for both serif and sans-serif. Simply because Uming does
not fit to other sans-serif fonts. Similarly I also don't agree with
making ZenHei being chosen as serif, because it doesn't fit.

> 5. Other packages, e.g. language-selector, still prefers Arphic UMing.

No, they don't. We have space restrains on the Live CD, that's why we
can only ship one font as the default Chinese font. The decision this
time was made to keep UMing in place, because it's partly funded by
Canonical (I'm the author of the UKai and Uming fonts and I got hired by
Canonical partly to speed up development of these fonts). As ZenHei came
around the corner, I took the opportunity to include it for sans-serif,
because it has a fairly good Unicode coverage already and is actively
developed. I had plans to create my own HeiTi font, but as it looks like
now, I'm more likely to collaborate with WQY to improve the ZenHei font.
However, I hope that in future UMing can be used for both Chinese and
Japanese desktops, so that we can kick out the Kochi Mincho font, which
is a real hog. If ZenHei can be accepted by the Japanese user community,
then it maybe can replace the Kochi Gothic font on the CD.

> 6. Although both adopts Firefly's bitmaps as you said, Zen Hei just lacks the professional touches of Uming, IMHO.

ZenHei has been touched much more professionally than UMing. The bitmaps
in UMing have not been modified for the CJK glyphs. They are the
original Firefly bitmaps and only cover Big5 and GB2312. All additional
glyphs don't have bitmaps at all, simply because I don't have enough
time to do it myself. Also I cannot import the WQY bitmaps, because of
license issues. The UMing font is APL, the WQY fonts are GPL.

But let me stress it one more time: none of the existing CJK fonts is
perfect, all have some pros and cons. However, at least the UKai/Uming
and WQY fonts are actively maintained and will improve over time. But as
any open-source project, we need contributers to do the work. If you
want to help to improve the fonts, you are welcome to join the projects.

> fangq, thank you for your hard work in creating the open source Zen Hei.
> As I said in the bug description, it is an excellent new font. I am
> reporting this bug from a user's perspective which, I believe, can
> represent the opinions of a good portion of users. I wish Zen Hei and
> font rendering libraries would further mature to a state that Zen Hei
> can become a satisfactory default font for most Chinese users.

Until now, you are the only one who complains. ;)

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