[LUAU] CJK in FC4

Hawaii Linux Institute wp at HawaiiLinux.us
Wed Aug 10 11:47:14 PDT 2005


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.)



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