Bug 105990

Summary:	Chinese font rendering during installation is ugly.
Product:	[openSUSE] SUSE LINUX 10.0	Reporter:	Zhe Su <zsu>
Component:	Installation	Assignee:	Mike Fabian <mfabian>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:	Klaus Kämpf <kkaempf>
Severity:	Normal
Priority:	P5 - None
Version:	Beta 2
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	Other
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
Found By:	Other	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---
Attachments:	screen shot of yast2 chinese installation interface. FZSongTi-embedded-bitmaps-ugly-kana.png

Description Zhe Su 2005-08-20 07:28:00 UTC

I found that during installation, embedded bitmap support is disabled in
/etc/fonts/local.conf. It causes very ugly Chinese (maybe Japanese as well) font
rendering effact when the font size is small.

I'm just wondering why embedded bitmap is disabled? Is there any reason?

Comment 1 Zhe Su 2005-08-20 07:32:11 UTC

Created attachment 46753 [details]
screen shot of yast2 chinese installation interface.

The Chinese characters are very fuzzy and ugly.

Comment 2 Mike Fabian 2005-08-20 08:36:18 UTC

See /etc/fonts/local.conf.instsys.

For the reason see the changelog of the fontconfig package:

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Fri Mar 11 12:32:32 CET 2005 - mfabian@suse.de

- Bugzilla #66498 again: the last change wasn't a good idea after
  all. The design of the embedded bitmaps is quite bad in some
  sizes, especially the Japanese katakana look extremely ugly.
  Therefore it is better not to use the embedded bitmaps during
  the installation. I added a special /etc/fonts/local.conf.instsys
  file which should be copied to /etc/fonts/local.conf only for
  the installation and which is not used in the installed system.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Thu Mar 03 18:36:21 CET 2005 - mfabian@suse.de

- Bugzilla #66498: use embedded bitmaps for Korean and Japanese
  as well, not only for Chinese as before to get readable Japanese
  and Chinese during the installation. The Latin fonts we currently
  use during the installation are smaller as before. With the
  Gnu Unifont currently used for CJK, this leads to clipping
  problems because this bitmap font cannot scale to a smaller size.
  When using TrueType fonts like FZSongTi for CJK, the clipping
  problems disappear because the font can scale down. But in such
  a tiny size, Japanese or Chinese is almost unreadable with
  Anti-Aliasing. It's better readable with the embedded bitmaps.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

I.e. disabling the embedded bitmaps was a quick hack to avoid using
the extremely ugly Japanese Kana in the Chinese FZSongTi font for
Japanese.

I will enable embedded bitmaps again because Stefan Hundhammer
has recently implemented fontswitching code in YaST2.
If that works, FZSongTi will never be used for Japanese, IPAGothic
will be used again.

Comment 3 Mike Fabian 2005-08-20 08:40:36 UTC

Created attachment 46756 [details]
FZSongTi-embedded-bitmaps-ugly-kana.png

ugly Japanese Kana bitmaps in FZSongTi (16 Pixel).

Comment 4 Mike Fabian 2005-08-20 08:48:16 UTC

I submitted a changed fontconfig package to STABLE which enables the
embedded bitmaps during the installation again.  (I'm not sure whether
this change will show up in Beta3, we are already past the deadline of
Beta3, it might show up in Beta4 only).

Closing as FIXED.