VL Gothic make chinese and korean scratch , we need droidsansfallback , I hate VL Gothic
Hi xuiv!
Is “Droidsansfallback” the same as “WenQuanYi Micro Hei” that is available through HaikuDepot?
Regards,
Humdinger
默认的字体检索顺序就是在VL Gothic中找东亚字体，中文和韩文都没法显示，如果你装三方字体，haiku是不默认使用的，早年用linux也是这个日文字体影响中文韩文使用，它的unicode位置和其它文字重合，但不是那个字。我现在只能把doridsansfallback中的字体名改为vl gothic来使用，不然你主动改自己的字体为首选自体，mono字体必然是乱码。
Hi,
VL-Gothic was chosen because it supports Japanese well. For Chinese we included WQY Microhei, which according to another Chinese user, is a good choice. Unfortunately, we don't have a system to map languages to fonts yet (we should for example use Fontconfig for this).
It should be possible to change fonts in preferences/Appearance for the whole system. VL-Gothic is used as a "fallback" when no characters are found in the font selected there. Droid Sans may work better for Chinese and Korean, but will it work for Japanese too? If it does, we should use it as the fallback. But the correct way to fix this is a better system to pick the right font for each language (and detection of the language using the characters used).
This whole approach can’t work. The three cultural groups you mentioned have strong preferences for different appearances of certain Han characters, there are other examples of this in Cyrillic for example, but with the Han characters it is most notable. It simply isn’t possible to satisfy them all with one representation of the characters, indeed in some cases only quite educated people will even realise that the variants used in other languages are supposed to be the same character as the one they’re most familiar with.
I presume your native language is written in a modern latin script. Imagine if you had only ever seen serif latin letters, and then one day you see the alphabet in bold sans-serif - you would probably assume it is a completely separate alphabet, perhaps influenced by yours but certainly not the same one. A scholar might insist that the lowercase a you’re used to is “the same” as the lowercase a in this new system despite the great difference in shape but you would scarcely believe them. The rift between how Japanese and Chinese write the Han characters is much wider than that.
Yes, I know this, and it is why VL-Gothic is only used as a “fallback” in Haiku (it only allows us to display “something” rather than missing character squares). As I mentionned, fontconfig should be used to make the right decision on which font to use, as they know about these problems and which font is suitable for which language.
We could switch to Droid Sans Fallback if it provides more complete coverage in more languages. It won't fix the issue that either Chinese or Japanese people will not be happy with it, but we can increase our coverage for other things (for example Hangul characters for Korean). The goal here is just to avoid the "missing character" symbol. This doesn't solve the problem that fontconfig does.
Droid Sans FallBack work better for Japanese，it is Android fonts for CJK, Chinese Korean Japanese.