gcin: traditional chinese input in arch

dp · 2005-06-28 21:46:45

after request for gcin here:
http://bugs.archlinux.org/index.php?do=details&id=2783
now it is available in [extra]

whisky · 2005-06-28 22:28:52

Tks dp, this app is in our repository @ alcle(Arch Linux @ CLE) for long time now (actually, we did, but in the wiki page only - under the translation section) with additional inout table. I didnt mention it nor post it to AUR coz we didnt see many chinese (language - mainly for zh_TW) user requesting it in the forum (sorry I didnt check other place than the forum).

We also have the PKGBUILD for chinese fonts and scim (and some IM Engin but not all)

It will be nice if we can coordinate together our effort . My goal is a package group named ArchCLE, which will provide all base app/packages for a complet chinese - zh_TW - environnemnt, including fonts/IME/Locale setting/patch for some apps like firefox and etc. And with a simple pacman -S archcle, a chinese (zh_TW) enable Arch Linux environnement should be done..

well.. it is still in a "dreaming" stage but it is really nice to see gcin entering the extra repo..

dp · 2005-06-29 12:10:35

yes, coordination would be great ... i'm in charge of making arch support multibyte languages with pkgs from official repos. first steps have been taken with the indic fonts and the gcin pkg. please email me, so that we can coordinate our effort. thank you very much in advance
damir

aquila_deus · 2005-07-02 07:48:40

dp wrote:

yes, coordination would be great ... i'm in charge of making arch support multibyte languages with pkgs from official repos. first steps have been taken with the indic fonts and the gcin pkg. please email me, so that we can coordinate our effort. thank you very much in advance
damir

Hi! There are several good chinese fonts:

(Ming)
http://glyph.iso10646hk.net/download/DFSongSd.ttf
http://www.arphic.net/tw/download/bsmi00lp.zip
http://www.arphic.net/tw/download/gbsn00lp.zip

(Kai)
http://www.arphic.net/tw/download/bkai00mp.zip
http://www.arphic.net/tw/download/gkai00mp.zip

the fonts in arphic.net are completely free and have been included in some distros, dunno about DFSongStd.

And the following part in fonts.conf can let you see chinese text with english fonts:

  <match target="pattern">
    <test name="family" qual="any">
      <string>Albany</string>
      <string>Arial</string>
      <string>Arial Narrow</string>
      <string>Bitstream Vera Sans Mono</string>
      <string>Bitstream Vera Sans</string>
      <string>Comic Sans MS</string>
      <string>Gill Sans</string>
      <string>Lucida Sans Typewriter</string>
      <string>Lucida Sans</string>
      <string>MS Sans Serif</string>
      <string>Microsoft Sans Serif</string>
      <string>Monaco</string>
      <string>Monospac821 BT</string>
      <string>Myriad Pro</string>
      <string>Tahoma</string>
      <string>Trebuchet MS</string>
      <string>Verdana</string>
    </test>
    <edit mode="append" name="family">
      <string>AR PL KaitiM Big5</string>
    </edit>
    <edit mode="append" name="family">
      <string>AR PL KaitiM GB</string>
    </edit>
  </match>
  <match target="pattern">
    <test name="family" qual="any">
      <string>Apple Garamond Light</string>
      <string>Apple Garamond</string>
      <string>Baskerville</string>
      <string>Bitstream Vera Serif</string>
      <string>Cochin</string>
      <string>Courier Std</string>
      <string>Cumberland</string>
      <string>Garamond</string>
      <string>Georgia</string>
      <string>Lucida Bright</string>
      <string>Lucida Typewriter</string>
      <string>Lucida</string>
      <string>Minion Pro</string>
      <string>Palatino Linotype</string>
      <string>Thorndale</string>
      <string>Times New Roman</string>
    </test>
    <edit mode="append" name="family">
      <string>DFSongStd</string>
    </edit>
  </match>

[/code]

whisky · 2005-07-02 16:10:31

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fCJKUnifonts

they are all in our repo already (uni_ming)

dp, I will try to sum up all these in my next mail to you..

dp · 2005-07-02 21:35:55

whisky wrote:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fCJKUnifonts
they are all in our repo already (uni_ming)
dp, I will try to sum up all these in my next mail to you..

ttf-arphic-uming and ttf-arphic-ukai are going to [extra]

... by the way: is there any other resource to download them? i only found

http://debian.linux.org.tw/pub/3Anoppix … 1-1.tar.gz

and

http://debian.linux.org.tw/pub/3Anoppix … 1-1.tar.gz

... both on debian servers ... so i guess this is a debian project?

dp · 2005-07-02 21:44:11

aquila_deus wrote:

Hi! There are several good chinese fonts:
(Ming)
http://glyph.iso10646hk.net/download/DFSongSd.ttf
http://www.arphic.net/tw/download/bsmi00lp.zip
http://www.arphic.net/tw/download/gbsn00lp.zip
(Kai)
http://www.arphic.net/tw/download/bkai00mp.zip
http://www.arphic.net/tw/download/gkai00mp.zip
the fonts in arphic.net are completely free and have been included in some distros, dunno about DFSongStd.

thank you for this links.

the arphic net seem to be from 2002 and the ones from freedesktop wiki (the ones whisky mentioned) from 2005. i think the 2005 ones are more complete for other charsets. am i right?

aquila_deus wrote:

And the following part in fonts.conf can let you see chinese text with english fonts:

  <match target="pattern">
    <test name="family" qual="any">
      <string>Albany</string>
      <string>Arial</string>
      <string>Arial Narrow</string>
      <string>Bitstream Vera Sans Mono</string>
      <string>Bitstream Vera Sans</string>
      <string>Comic Sans MS</string>
      <string>Gill Sans</string>
      <string>Lucida Sans Typewriter</string>
      <string>Lucida Sans</string>
      <string>MS Sans Serif</string>
      <string>Microsoft Sans Serif</string>
      <string>Monaco</string>
      <string>Monospac821 BT</string>
      <string>Myriad Pro</string>
      <string>Tahoma</string>
      <string>Trebuchet MS</string>
      <string>Verdana</string>
    </test>
    <edit mode="append" name="family">
      <string>AR PL KaitiM Big5</string>
    </edit>
    <edit mode="append" name="family">
      <string>AR PL KaitiM GB</string>
    </edit>
  </match>
  <match target="pattern">
    <test name="family" qual="any">
      <string>Apple Garamond Light</string>
      <string>Apple Garamond</string>
      <string>Baskerville</string>
      <string>Bitstream Vera Serif</string>
      <string>Cochin</string>
      <string>Courier Std</string>
      <string>Cumberland</string>
      <string>Garamond</string>
      <string>Georgia</string>
      <string>Lucida Bright</string>
      <string>Lucida Typewriter</string>
      <string>Lucida</string>
      <string>Minion Pro</string>
      <string>Palatino Linotype</string>
      <string>Thorndale</string>
      <string>Times New Roman</string>
    </test>
    <edit mode="append" name="family">
      <string>DFSongStd</string>
    </edit>
  </match>

[/code]

this everybody can change in the config, if needed. for me, it seems to work also without with bitstream fonts (konqueror) but if it is better to have this family names generally defined (at least for the one fonts that come with the pkgs in arch) then we should open a bug-report against the pkg owning fonts.conf to have this added. .... we will see after some testing

dp · 2005-07-02 22:01:56

i have just tested the ttf-arphic-uming font. wow! cool! it provides a really wide range of unicode regions. even some chars from tibetian are here. i hope this project will enhance this font to support most of the unicode regions. ... also it looks not bad ;-)

thanx for the links!

HybridTheory · 2005-07-06 04:17:59

Hi dp,thank you for your hard work.
you know,by gcin we can only input traditional Chinese,so how about put SCIM in together? It's a common input method,so not only traditional Chinese or simplified Chinese can be inputed,but other languages like Korean and Japanese and Russian and so on.Please think about it,thank you.

dp · 2005-07-06 07:29:47

HybridTheory wrote:

Hi dp,thank you for your hard work.
you know,by gcin we can only input traditional Chinese,so how about put SCIM in together? It's a common input method,so not only traditional Chinese or simplified Chinese can be inputed,but other languages like Korean and Japanese and Russian and so on.Please think about it,thank you.

scim is on my list, but it needs more thinking and coordination, because it's not just one pkg. i assure you that it will be in extra soon. if you have other ideas, feel free to contact me per email

whisky · 2005-07-06 19:53:46

dp,

as I wrote in my last email, scim (gtk) and skim (kde) are the core part of the framework. To be able to use scim/skim, we still need to install divers IME (from chinese to vietnamen and many others).

I suggest to separate each IME in its own package, and let ppl install whatever they want to use. It will be also more easier to add new IME to scim/skim

dp · 2005-07-06 20:05:13

whisky wrote:

dp,
as I wrote in my last email, scim (gtk) and skim (kde) are the core part of the framework. To be able to use scim/skim, we still need to install divers IME (from chinese to vietnamen and many others).
I suggest to separate each IME in its own package, and let ppl install whatever they want to use. It will be also more easier to add new IME to scim/skim

yep, exactly this is how i had it in mind ;-)

whisky · 2005-07-06 20:22:47

dp,

I forgot to mention one thing...

scim/skim has the same version number policy as the kernel's. That means, 1.0.x/1.2.x/1.4.x are stables, and 1.1.x/1.3.x/.. are the dev versions

So, it might be important to have the stable version only in the current, and dev are available in the testing (unstable?) ?

HybridTheory · 2005-07-12 12:22:14

Hi dp.

About fonts.conf I think maybe you can add one line

<string>AR PL ShanHeiSun Uni</string>

after each "Luxi xxxx" so the default Chinese display will be perfect.

Of course everyone can edit the config file by himself/herself but I think linux is not only for advanced user now and it need more users.If after somebody Chinese installed arch finding it can't display Chinese beautifully maybe he/her will lose confidence to use linux.

And another problem is after upgrading fontconfig package perhaps the newer version fonts.conf overwrites the older one so the one we have edited is ruined.

Adding this line will not disturb non-Chinese users either.

dp · 2005-07-12 15:52:14

HybridTheory wrote:

Hi dp.
About fonts.conf I think maybe you can add one line
<string>AR PL ShanHeiSun Uni</string>
after each "Luxi xxxx" so the default Chinese display will be perfect.

nobody should edit fonts.conf by hand. somewhere i read that local.conf is for this.

however, i'm not sure why this should be needed. the fonts work directly without any editing for me. note that the packages in [extra] do update the font cache after install and therefore may trigger fontconfig to find them correctly. did you tried them or use your own pkgs?

i'm not prefectly sure on this matter. maybe you are right.

HybridTheory wrote:

Of course everyone can edit the config file by himself/herself but I think linux is not only for advanced user now and it need more users.If after somebody Chinese installed arch finding it can't display Chinese beautifully maybe he/her will lose confidence to use linux.

this is true, but arch is a distribution for newbies who want to learn how to use the full power of linux. editing a config file is easy, once you started to play with this things. i don't disagree that the start should be as easy as possible and we should make the fonts work out-of-the-box ;-) (i think they are already directly working)

HybridTheory wrote:

And another problem is after upgrading fontconfig package perhaps the newer version fonts.conf overwrites the older one so the one we have edited is ruined.
Adding this line will not disturb non-Chinese users either.

you can stop the overwriting by setting this file to NoUpgrade in /etc/pacman.conf

if this do not disturb systems where this font is not installed, then we can add it to fonts.conf (fontconfig package) if this is the right way of handling this things.

HybridTheory · 2005-07-13 13:20:58

thank you first.

the reason why we must edit this file is that many Chinese fonts itself has its own english font but almost everyone is very ugly.

So if we want to use beautiful Chinese and English together ,we must choose a beautiful english font and when the system find a character but it's not included in the english font,the fontconfig(or freetype? I'm not sure about this) program will look for another font in the fonts.conf one by one in the order in the list until find one that including this character.
So the goal for editing this file is to let the program use "AR PL ShanHeiSun Uni" to replace the character the english font don't have but other ugly Chinese fonts.

dp · 2005-07-13 13:47:25

HybridTheory wrote:

thank you first.
the reason why we must edit this file is that many Chinese fonts itself has its own english font but almost everyone is very ugly.
So if we want to use beautiful Chinese and English together ,we must choose a beautiful english font and when the system find a character but it's not included in the english font,the fontconfig(or freetype? I'm not sure about this) program will look for another font in the fonts.conf one by one in the order in the list until find one that including this character.
So the goal for editing this file is to let the program use "AR PL ShanHeiSun Uni" to replace the character the english font don't have but other ugly Chinese fonts.

i agree with you fully, that we should make fontconfig work the way to display the fonts always correctly. the only thing i'm not sure is where we should make a change, if any, so that this is done. in docs of new fontconfig, everybody tells that you should not edit fonts.conf but local.conf.

hope that in near future we will come to a solution that suits everybody

funkyou · 2006-08-09 12:31:25

Maybe someone can help me with this...

I am currently in need of a traditional chinese KDE environment, not to write in chinese but to read, copy and paste some chinese text. So i installed the following packages:

ttf-arphic-ukai
ttf-arphic-uming
kde-i18n-zh_tw

and turned on the following entries in /etc/locale.gen:

zh_TW.UTF-8 UTF-8
zh_TW BIG5

Now i can switch the fonts in KDE to one of the two mentioned above, and then i can switch between german and traditional chinese too, it all works... But when i am in german, the fonts characters look very blurred and are almost unreadable.

So, how can i solve this? Is there maybe a font which provides european and traditional chinese characters and is as sharp as the bitstream fonts?

I have also modified my ~/.fonts.conf as mentioned in this thread...

Si · 2007-05-26 00:03:46

funkyou wrote:

Maybe someone can help me with this...
I am currently in need of a traditional chinese KDE environment, not to write in chinese but to read, copy and paste some chinese text. So i installed the following packages:
ttf-arphic-ukai
ttf-arphic-uming
kde-i18n-zh_tw
and turned on the following entries in /etc/locale.gen:
zh_TW.UTF-8 UTF-8
zh_TW BIG5
Now i can switch the fonts in KDE to one of the two mentioned above, and then i can switch between german and traditional chinese too, it all works... But when i am in german, the fonts characters look very blurred and are almost unreadable.
So, how can i solve this? Is there maybe a font which provides european and traditional chinese characters and is as sharp as the bitstream fonts?
I have also modified my ~/.fonts.conf as mentioned in this thread...

Well I accidentally came across this thread, and I know this thread is old, but did you solve the problem of blurry text?

goetzkluge · 2011-04-02 12:19:35

FYI: As scim didn´t work with firefox 4 and I was interested in gcin, I migrated to gcin.

Installed it. In .xinitrc I entered:

export XMODIFIERS=@im=GCIN
export GTK_IM_MODULE="gcin"
export QT_IM_MODULE="gcin"

That worked fine with me.

Arch Linux

#1 2005-06-28 21:46:45

gcin: traditional chinese input in arch

#2 2005-06-28 22:28:52

Re: gcin: traditional chinese input in arch

#3 2005-06-29 12:10:35

Re: gcin: traditional chinese input in arch

#4 2005-07-02 07:48:40

Re: gcin: traditional chinese input in arch

#5 2005-07-02 16:10:31

Re: gcin: traditional chinese input in arch

#6 2005-07-02 21:35:55

Re: gcin: traditional chinese input in arch

#7 2005-07-02 21:44:11

Re: gcin: traditional chinese input in arch

#8 2005-07-02 22:01:56

Re: gcin: traditional chinese input in arch

#9 2005-07-06 04:17:59

Re: gcin: traditional chinese input in arch

#10 2005-07-06 07:29:47

Re: gcin: traditional chinese input in arch

#11 2005-07-06 19:53:46

Re: gcin: traditional chinese input in arch

#12 2005-07-06 20:05:13

Re: gcin: traditional chinese input in arch

#13 2005-07-06 20:22:47

Re: gcin: traditional chinese input in arch

#14 2005-07-12 12:22:14

Re: gcin: traditional chinese input in arch

#15 2005-07-12 15:52:14

Re: gcin: traditional chinese input in arch

#16 2005-07-13 13:20:58

Re: gcin: traditional chinese input in arch

#17 2005-07-13 13:47:25

Re: gcin: traditional chinese input in arch

#18 2006-08-09 12:31:25

Re: gcin: traditional chinese input in arch

#19 2007-05-26 00:03:46

Re: gcin: traditional chinese input in arch

#20 2011-04-02 12:19:35

Re: gcin: traditional chinese input in arch

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