Hello all, With prompting of a new dev initiative to make Gentoo more desktop friendly, I've decided to post my 6-month-old problems in setting up Japanese fonts for XFree86. Hopefully, the thread applies to more general cases as well. :-)
The default X installation does provide fonts for Japanese but they're terribly ugly and almost unreadable by a non-Japanese. I've emerged several fonts from portage but I find most of them are missing many important characters. As a "fix", I've done what most people have done and just added Arial-Unicode for Japanese display. In setting up fonts for X, I've just added several FontPath entries to XF86Config and ran mkfontdir, mkfontscale and ttmkfdir in all directories. My questions: * What is the recommended way to set up fonts? According to the forums, xfs is deprecated and a fontconfig setup via /etc/fonts is the way to go. All the threads are over a year old, though. Personally, I've found that adding directories to /etc/fonts/local.conf has had no effect. * How do I specify which fonts to pull characters from if they're not available in the selected font? This seems to change depending on what fonts are installed. I would find it intuitive if it used the ugly fonts that come with X until something else is specified, but that doesn't seem to be the case. * How can I specify which fonts should be alpha-blended and when? Most Japanese fonts are displayed without alpha-blending in most applications. Some applications, most notably openoffice, will display the same fonts with alpha-blending. I would like to have all fonts alpha-blended all the time. Yeah, some people say they're easier to read when small, but I find them unreadable either way at 4pt. ;-) Any answers will be greatly appreciated. Jason -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
