BetterCJKSupportSpecification

Revision 16 as of 2005-12-07 13:38:11

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Summary

This project aims at improving CJK support in Ubuntu.

Rationale

As of Breezy, the default configuration for various applications and the whole desktop is not so suitable for Asian users and users from certain countries. For example, default desktop font size is simply too small for CJK users, especially Chinese. To improve the experience for these users, some packages need to be patched, while others may need additional configuration.

Use cases

Scope

Design

  1. Install a default input method such as scim, and start it automatically when user start X. Besides, users should be allowed to have their own individual setting.
    • Useful links here for Korean Input Methods
    • Scim shall be the default input method, there are already many IM engines based on scim, and so far its language support is the best. Even Fedora and Mandriva are using it by default.
  2. Tune fontconfig setting to achieve better CJK fonts display (e.g. more solid font outline, bold type, use bitmap for medium font size etc). Surely,to obtain this, we need some font package's support like ttf-arphic-uming/ukai.
    • Use ttf-arphic-uming/ukai by default, since these are the only package that contain Hong Kong characters for all sizes.
    • Install xfonts-wqy for simplified Chinese installation; ttf-newsung is not needed since it has already been included into uming/ukai.
  3. CJK users should be able to display their mp3 file ID3 tag correctly. Historically these tagging issue is a mess, everybody is using her own legacy encoding for mp3 tag because there is no support for non-western languages until very recent ID3 tag specification.
    • For applications which make use of GStreamer, setting GST_ID3_TAG_ENCODING can be an internim solution. There are more discussions on ["UTFEightCurrentProblems"].
  4. (?) Allow users to read/write CJK under console.
    • Or when this is impossible, change $LANGUAGE to C automatically so that users won't see lots of junk on console.

  5. Better support of CJK fonts in OpenOffice.org.

  6. Configure firefox for print CJK correctly
    • This can probably be done in per-language basis, in firefox language packs.
  7. Enable embolden font by default for CJK users

    • Debian unstable has freetype 2.1.10 - Dapper has this now (2005/11/11), please take care of next two items below.

    • Build xft2, fontconfig, pango and cairo2 with embolden enabled
    • This bug found on Debian's freetype 2.1.10 package, of course same with Dapper's :

      1. words in sentence are individually displayed right-upward like as several slopes. This often happens in bigger size like as web page heading than smaller, and in Konqueror and Opera than Firefox. But, a Gentoo user who had compiled xorg-x11-7.0 rc1 showed much nicer screen. Please see the screenshots in this link. http://bbs.kldp.org/viewtopic.php?t=65304&highlight= Also you might catch rendering quality by Akito's patch (top) and "embolden" (bottom) from this screenshot. Top one is much better. http://bbs.kldp.org/download.php?id=5319

Implementation

Code

Data preservation and migration

Outstanding issues

BoF agenda and discussion