Picking FreeType CJK fonts for xterm
on a modern Linux system
Once I worked out how to make xterm
show Chinese, Japanese, and
Korean characters, I had to figure
out what font to use. I discussed the general details of using
FontConfig to hunt for CJK fonts in that entry, so now let's get down to details.
The Arch Linux xterm
example uses 'WenQuanYi
Bitmap Song' as its example CJK font. This is from the Wen Quan
Yi font collection, and
they're available for Fedora in a collection of wqy-*-fonts packages.
So I started out with 'WenQuanYi Zen Hei Mono' as the closest thing
that I already had installed on my system.
(Descriptions of Chinese fonts often talk about them being an 'X style' font. It turns out that Chinese has different styles of typography, analogous to how Latin fonts have serif and sans-serif styles; see here or here or here for three somewhat random links that talk about eg Heiti vs Mingti. Japanese apparently has a similar but simpler split, per here, with the major divisions being called 'gothic' and 'Mincho'. Learning this has suddenly made some Japanese font names make a lot more sense.)
Fedora itself has a Localization fonts requirements
wiki page. The important and useful bit of this page is a matrix
of language and the default and additional fonts Fedora apparently
prefers for it. Note that each of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
pick different fonts here; there isn't one CJK font that's the
first or even second preference for all of them. Since you have to
pick only one font for xterm
's CJK font, you may want to think
about which language you care most about.
(This is probably where Han unification sticks its head up, too. Fedora talks about maybe influencing font rendering choices here on its Identifying fonts page.)
In Ubuntu, apparently some CJK default fonts have changed to
Google's Noto CJK family.
A discussion in that bug suggests that Fedora may also have changed
its defaults to the Noto CJK fonts, contrary to what its wiki sort of
implies. The Arch Wiki has its usual comprehensive list of CJK
font options
and there's also Wikipedia's general list. Neither particularly
mentions monospaced fonts, though, assuming that this is even
something that one has to consider in CJK fonts for xterm
.
All of this led me to peer into the depths of /etc/fonts/conf.d
on my Fedora machines to look for mentions of monospace. Here I
found interesting configuration file snippets that said things like:
<match> <test name="lang"> <string>ja</string> </test> <test name="family"> <string>monospace</string> </test> <edit name="family" mode="prepend"> <string>Noto Sans Mono CJK JP</string> </edit> </match> <alias> <family>Noto Sans Mono CJK JP</family> <default> <family>monospace</family> </default> </alias>
I'm not really up on FontConfig magic, but this sure looked like it was setting up a 'Noto Sans Mono CJK JP' font as a monospace font if you wanted things in Japanese. There's also KR, SC (Simplified Chinese), and TC (Traditional Chinese) variants of Noto Sans Mono CJK lurking in the depths of my Fedora system.
After looking at an xterm
using WenQuanYi Zen Hei Mono side by
side with one using Noto Sans Mono CJK JP, I decided that the Noto
version was probably better looking (on my very limited sample of
CJK text, mostly in file names and font names) and also I felt
slightly more confident in picking it, since it seemed more likely
to be closer to how eg gnome-terminal
was operating and also the
general trend of CJK font choices in various Linuxes. I wish I could
find out what CJK font(s) gnome-terminal
was using, but the
design of current versions makes that
difficult.
(Some experimentation suggests that in my setup, gnome-terminal
may be using VL Gothic here. I guess I can live with all of this,
however it comes out; mostly I just want CJK characters to show up
as something other than boxes or especially spaces.)
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