Jungshik Shin wrote: >> Linux locale to Chinese, which makes the desktop too ugly to me. >> Rationale: The good intent of Open Source developers may not result in >> understanding the requirements of Asian users owing to lack of native >> developers/testers/users. > > That's a bit strange. My desktop under ko_KR.UTF-8 locale is not so bad. > Anyway, it's not yet as pretty as that of Win32. > > I think it's not so much due to defects in programs as due to the lack of > high-quality fonts. These days, most Linux distributions come with free > truetype fonts for zh, ja, ko, th and other Asian scripts. However, > the number and the quality of fonts for Linux desktop are still > inferior to those for Windows.
The problem is mainly not font itself, but font combination. I really cannot bear the display of ASCII characters in Song Ti, which is simply ugly (and fixed width). Beginning with Windows 2000, Windows could choose the font to use based on the Unicode range (Java does this too). In the English locale Linux seems to be able to do so, but in the Chinese locale all is in the Chinese font, which is not suitable at all for Latin characters. I used an Windows Gtk application, which used Tahoma (an good sans serif font) at first. But after an upgrade it automatically chose to use the system default font, which is the Chinese Song Ti. It took me several hours to "correct" the ugly and corrupt (yes, because dialogue dimensions are different) display. However, I must add that this problem exists in many commercial software as well. Although generally it is because Microsoft (foolishly) chose to map MS Sans Serif to Song Ti on Simplified Chinese Windows. In the Gtk application I mentioned above, it is a little different: the configuration file showed that the application "smartly" chose to use the ugly font in the upgrade release! >> There seems little sense now arguing the virtues of UTF-8 and UTF-16. >> Technically they both have advantages and disadvantages. I suppose we >> have presented enough of them in this discussion. > > Let me just add my last comment... > > If MS had decided to use UTF-8 (instead of coming up with a whole new > set of APIs for UTF-16) with 'A' APIs, Mozilla developers' headache(and > that of other opensource developers) mentioned above would have been > a lot easier to cure :-) Of course, this is just one aspect of > UTF-8/'A' APIs vs UTF-16/'W' APIs and there are many other things to > consider in case of Win32. It seems impossible because there are some many legacy applications. On the Simplified Chinese versions of Windows, 'A' always implies GB2312/GBK. Switching ALL to UTF-8 seems too radical an idea about 1994. At the time Microsoft adopted Unicode, people might truly believe UCS-2 is enough for most application, and Microsoft had not the file name compatibility burden in Unix (I suppose you all know that the long file names in Windows are in UTF-16). I would not blame Microsoft for this. Also consider the following fact: Windows 95 emerged at a time when many people had only 8MB of RAM. Yah, I don't think AT THAT TIME we could tolerate a 50% growth in memory occupation. Best regards, Wu Yongwei -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
