Aloha all, A couple of days ago, a group of Fedora Core users at Harvard released a set of bitmap fonts which cover complete CJK Unified Ideographics (20,902 characters at 4 pixel sizes and two weights, totalling more than 180,000 glyphs):
http://wqy.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi?BitmapSong (in simplified Chinese) After installed it, my first reaction was, this is grand theft, or at least blatant plagiarism! But, hey, this is GPL. The original creator of these fonts (Mr. "Firefly") actually was very relieved that someone was able to continue the torch and make the flame brighter. Lack of CJK support used to be an Achilles heel for Linux, but it may have become one of its most potent weapons. In the English version of Windows XP-Pro, you are able to input CJK fonts, but this ability is somewhat rudimentary. There are 3rd party Windows programs for inputting Chinese characters, but since software is mostly free in the Chinese-speaking commuity, no one is willing to care about their quality. In a previous thread, I briefly mentioned how drastically the process of I/O'ing Chinese fonts has improved under iiimf in FC4. Here, I will do a very simple demo regarding Japanese characters: -> miyamoto musashi -> みやもと むさし -> ミヤモトムサシ -> 宮本武蔵 The first group of characters are your keyboard input. When iiimf is running and activated, your screen will show the corresponding Hiragana characters (2nd group). Press down cursor key, they convert to Katakana (3rd group). Press space key followed by the down cursor key, a list of Kanjis will pop up for you to select (4th group). Isn't this great? If you have connections to our local CJK community, and/or are interested in promoting Linux in that community, and would like to have a sounding board, please let me know. Wayne (Don't know Japanese? McKinley has an English-centric Japanese language program. After 30 dollars and 30 hours, you may become itchy to try to sell Fedora machines in Japan.)
