Bugzilla – Bug 105990
Chinese font rendering during installation is ugly.
Last modified: 2005-08-20 08:48:16 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?
Created attachment 46753 [details] screen shot of yast2 chinese installation interface. The Chinese characters are very fuzzy and ugly.
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.
Created attachment 46756 [details] FZSongTi-embedded-bitmaps-ugly-kana.png ugly Japanese Kana bitmaps in FZSongTi (16 Pixel).
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.