Japanese Font

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Clearpotion
Posts: 13
Joined: July 15th, 2010, 11:17 am
Location: Japan

Japanese Font

Post by Clearpotion »

Wesnoth 1.9 (also 1.8 ) on Windows XP, Japanese.
Some characters are unreadable.

The Chinese font wqy-zenhei.ttc is not good for Japanese language, because some characters are unreadable and strange.
The old version of BfW has the Japanese font sazanami, but it doesn't have italic type for <i> tag, ether.
So, how about including Takao font? TakaoPGothic.ttf has no problem and it is an Ubuntu font. Maybe the license is OK.

Takao Font
https://launchpad.net/takao-fonts
Takao Font is under IPA Font License Agreement v1.0.

-fonts.cfg
order=_ "DejaVuSans.ttf,TakaoPGothic.ttf,Andagii.ttf,wqy-zenhei.ttc"
family_order=_ "DejaVu Sans,TakaoPGothic,Andagii,WenQuanYi Zen Hei"
[font]
name="TakaoPGothic.ttf"
[/font]
Attachments
Takao (tips)
Takao (tips)
sazanami (tips)
sazanami (tips)
Default : Chinese font wqy-zenhei (tips)
Default : Chinese font wqy-zenhei (tips)
iwaim
Posts: 10
Joined: February 24th, 2010, 1:42 am
Location: Tokyo, JAPAN
Contact:

Re: Japanese Font

Post by iwaim »

Clearpotion wrote: So, how about including Takao font? TakaoPGothic.ttf has no problem and it is an Ubuntu font. Maybe the license is OK.

Takao Font
https://launchpad.net/takao-fonts
Takao Font is under IPA Font License Agreement v1.0.
I think it's nice idea.
"IPA Font License Agreement v1.0" is one of the OSD compliant licenses by OSI.[1]

[1] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ipafont.html
IWAI, Masaharu a.k.a iwaim as the BfW Japanese maintainer/translator
mistzone
Translator
Posts: 20
Joined: October 11th, 2010, 5:27 am

Re: Japanese Font

Post by mistzone »

yes Wesnoth should divide CJK font to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean font.

Andagii and DejaVuSans fonts have 7KB and 668KB, but wqy-zenhei.ttc has 12.6MB just because of Chinese characters.

I cannot even open that font with font editor because of its size.

English and other Latin alphabets have a similarity but CJK have no similarity.

Wesnoth should divide that font.
CloudiDust
Translator
Posts: 34
Joined: May 1st, 2010, 10:25 am

Re: Japanese Font

Post by CloudiDust »

I agree that CJK should have had separate fonts.

Besides the italic issue, I think the reason why wqy-zenhei cannot display perfect Japanese may be han unification in the Unicode spec (and wqy's maintainer is not Japanese after all). Learning Japanese now, it's indeed quite strange to see Chinese Hanzi when I am supposed to see Kanji. (I am using a Chinese windows system.)
mistzone wrote:
Andagii and DejaVuSans fonts have 7KB and 668KB, but wqy-zenhei.ttc has 12.6MB just because of Chinese characters.
Wqy-zenhei is said to cover the whole GB18130 character range (which at least includes all asian Characters in Unicode 3.0) so its quite large, maybe we can utilize something like Wqy Micro Hei for Chinese characters, which is only around 5.3 MB and covers CJK, the most common used subset of GB18130. (As the name implies this charset still contains some Japanese and Korean characters.)

I can run a poll to see if the Chinese wesnoth community agree on this change, and then with Takao being used for Japanese, the Korean players would have a chance to choose their fav font. :)
mistzone wrote:
English and other Latin alphabets have a similarity but CJK have no similarity.
Actually there's much similarity between Chinese Hanzi, Japanese Kanji and Korean Hanja (though Hanja is not frequently used in Korea now), which makes "han unification" possible and said unification is the reason why Japanese characters appear strange when rendered in Chinese fonts -- many Kanji's and their Hanzi / Kanja counterparts (that have a common root and similar meanings, but are somewhat different visually, like "Hanzi", "Kanji" and "Hanja" themselves) are mapped to the same codepoints in Unicode (in order to reduce the size of the spec) , and the Asian fonts may not have all the different glyphs for CJK or have no way to figure out whether they are supposed to represent a Chinese or Japanese or Korean character (eg. when using CJK characters in an western locale, or trying to display Japanese on a Chinese system, sometimes the locale settings are not even taken into account), so a Chinese font will provide Chinese characters in priority -- and they are subtlely wrong when representing Japanese.
CloudiDust, the Simplified Chinese translation maintainer.
AI
Developer
Posts: 2396
Joined: January 31st, 2008, 8:38 pm

Re: Japanese Font

Post by AI »

Due to han unification (actually, I've heard that the different versions of the han characters are still mutually intelligible, which would be the reason for it), the proper fix would be to use different fonts for each language.

Fortunately, this is possible. In wesnoth.po, the font order can be 'translated', so each language can use its own font if wanted. All that is required is that the font is distributed with wesnoth.
mistzone
Translator
Posts: 20
Joined: October 11th, 2010, 5:27 am

Re: Japanese Font

Post by mistzone »

AI wrote:Fortunately, this is possible. In wesnoth.po, the font order can be 'translated', so each language can use its own font if wanted. All that is required is that the font is distributed with wesnoth.
i have not known why there's 'msgid "DejaVuSans.ttf,Andagii.ttf,wqy-zenhei.ttc"' in wesnoth.po until i saw this :)

i'll try to find proper font to use with korean translation.
CloudiDust wrote:Actually there's much similarity between Chinese Hanzi, Japanese Kanji and Korean Hanja (though Hanja is not frequently used in Korea now), which makes "han unification" possible and said unification is the reason why Japanese characters appear strange when rendered in Chinese fonts -- many Kanji's and their Hanzi / Kanja counterparts (that have a common root and similar meanings, but are somewhat different visually, like "Hanzi", "Kanji" and "Hanja" themselves) are mapped to the same codepoints in Unicode (in order to reduce the size of the spec) , and the Asian fonts may not have all the different glyphs for CJK or have no way to figure out whether they are supposed to represent a Chinese or Japanese or Korean character (eg. when using CJK characters in an western locale, or trying to display Japanese on a Chinese system, sometimes the locale settings are not even taken into account), so a Chinese font will provide Chinese characters in priority -- and they are subtlely wrong when representing Japanese.
And i didn't think about Hanja problem because i don't use Hanja translating wesnoth. I was thoughtless to write that way :(

thanks to your replies :D
yma9
Posts: 10
Joined: November 8th, 2011, 11:19 am

Re: Japanese Font

Post by yma9 »

Still Wesnoth 1.9.11 (also 1.8.6) this problem remains.
See also attachment files in first message,I think Wesnoth has a serious bug,because it never show well now in ja.
Just you download Takao Font and install and apply fonts.cfg,so Wesnoth feel free from bug.
(Takao Font is under one of the OSD compliant licenses by OSI)
http://launchpad.net/takao-fonts/003.02 ... .01.tar.gz
yma9
Posts: 10
Joined: November 8th, 2011, 11:19 am

Re: Japanese Font

Post by yma9 »

Imagine this. If Russian designer make a font for the entire alphabet,
and you use poor Latin alphabet while Russian alphabet is perfect.It's a situation like that.

If you say takao's license is not fully compatible with the GPL,you can choice sazanami.At least sazanami does bot show garble. Takao or sazanami is a matter of taste.
CloudiDust
Translator
Posts: 34
Joined: May 1st, 2010, 10:25 am

Re: Japanese Font

Post by CloudiDust »

yma9 wrote:Imagine this. If Russian designer make a font for the entire alphabet,
and you use poor Latin alphabet while Russian alphabet is perfect.It's a situation like that.

If you say takao's license is not fully compatible with the GPL,you can choice sazanami.At least sazanami does bot show garble. Takao or sazanami is a matter of taste.
Whether Takao can be distributed with Wesnoth is still unclear, and I have emailed ivanovic for a clearfication.

Meanwhile, I figured out that Droid Sans Japanese combined with Droid Sans Fallback Full could be an acceptable solution for CJK. They provide italic characters, and can offer Japanese characters instead of Chinese ones if you give Droid Sans Japanese priority. They are both from Google Android's Droid font family and licensed under Apache License 2.0 which is fully GPL compatible.

This combination's total size is 6.17 MB while wqy-zenhei alone would consume 12.6 MB.

A screenshot of wesnoth 1.9.13 running in Japanese with Droid fonts:
Attachments
Japanese.jpg
CloudiDust, the Simplified Chinese translation maintainer.
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ivanovic
Lord of Translations
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Joined: September 28th, 2004, 10:10 pm
Location: Germany

Re: Japanese Font

Post by ivanovic »

Okay, so it all comes down to:
"Which fonts to include?"

We'd need fonts for the following languages:
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Japanese
Korean
(any langs we currently have that are not covered by DejaVuSans.ttf or Andagii.ttf, not sure if any exist since DejaVuSans covers many...)

Currently there is a font included which should cover the codepoints somehow for most of the chars available in the 4 translations listed above but as I heard those are far from perfect, especially when not using one of the Chinese variations. So what I'd need is to know which fonts to add/replace. CloudiDust also mentioned that there would be no italic characters included in the currently shipped font wqy-zenhei. So this is a list of what I'd need for each font proposed:
1) The "name" of the font.
2) Where to get the font.
3) The license of the font. Please keep in mind that it *HAS* to be GPL compatible or it can't be included in the package.
4) At least for GUI1 I'd need a list of codepoints supported by this font or a way to get this list (have a look at data/hardwired/fonts.cfg to see what is currently there).
5) For which language(s) this font can be used. Especially for the two variations of Chinese I'd prefer to just have one font covering both (if possible). Yes, I know that the "traditional" translation requires this freaking large font wqy-zenhei because of using more characters than the "simplified" Chinese.

Since I am not able to understand any of the listed languages I can't give any usable feedback either. I simply don't know what the differences between the languages are and what makes a good or a bad font for either.

BTW would it make sense to move this topic into the translations subforum? Since this is what this topic is actually about, not so much "just" some support issue but a way to "improve" some translations.
CloudiDust
Translator
Posts: 34
Joined: May 1st, 2010, 10:25 am

Re: Japanese Font

Post by CloudiDust »

Thanks for the replies, both here and in the mailbox.

Actually I made a detailed proposal myself, and I will post that in a new thread or wesnoth-i18n. (Which one would be better, or should I post twice?)

Now to answer the questions.

1. The name of the fonts are: Droid Sans Fallback and Droid Sans Japanese.

2. They are available at: http://android.git.linaro.org/gitweb?p= ... data/fonts

3. The license is: Apache License 2.0, GPL compatible.

4. I have generated new fonts.cfg.

5. Droid Sans Fallback covers CJK, which means the most frequently used characters in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. And by Chinese I mean both Simplified and Traditional. The reason for wqy-zenhei's 'freaking' size is that it covers many, many seldomly used characters.

But there is a problem, that is the 'han unification'. For the same unicode codepoint, the character it represents may have slightly different glyphs in different languages. So Droid Sans Japanese is used to provide Japanese glyphs if it is different from the Chinese ones.

Generally, Traditional Chinese characters would not share codepoints with their simplified counterparts, and commonly used Korean characters (Hangul) are also encoded in another region. Though the unification problem remains, a single unified font is considered 'tolerable' in daily use. (Still this is for reducing font size and development effort. There are commercial solutions for Android that adds support for fully standard-compatible Traditional Chinese characters and more.)

I think it makes sense to move this thread to the translation subforum.
CloudiDust, the Simplified Chinese translation maintainer.
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ivanovic
Lord of Translations
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Location: Germany

Re: Japanese Font

Post by ivanovic »

CloudiDust wrote:I think it makes sense to move this thread to the translation subforum.
Moved it and left a shadow entry in the old subforum.
yma9
Posts: 10
Joined: November 8th, 2011, 11:19 am

Re: Japanese Font

Post by yma9 »

Finally I agree this proposal,I will write this reason below.

Sadly,Now CJK on wesnoth font-subsystem can't fully optimize for 3 language,because of unicode limitation.
Only in japanese(I can't say about Chinese&Korean),I seem this font optimized for android use.
I think wesnoth(this font never designed for) is not main target.
But at least it contains all JIS X 0208(like japanese ASCII) character,and I can understand all writing shown by wesnoth with this font.
I think add-on font is best in future,but before 1.10 this is not real.
So, I agree Droid Sans Fallback now.
CloudiDust
Translator
Posts: 34
Joined: May 1st, 2010, 10:25 am

Re: Japanese Font

Post by CloudiDust »

yma9 wrote:Finally I agree this proposal,I will write this reason below.

Sadly,Now CJK on wesnoth font-subsystem can't fully optimize for 3 language,because of unicode limitation.
Only in japanese(I can't say about Chinese&Korean),I seem this font optimized for android use.
I think wesnoth(this font never designed for) is not main target.
But at least it contains all JIS X 0208(like japanese ASCII) character,and I can understand all writing shown by wesnoth with this font.
I think add-on font is best in future,but before 1.10 this is not real.
So, I agree Droid Sans Fallback now.
Please read my full proposal: http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=35745

Droid Sans Japanese combined with Droid Sans Fallback should solve the Japanese glyph problem without affecting the quality of Chinese and Korean glyphs.

It should be noted that if you only downloaded the DSF and DSJ fonts from the official Android repository and modified font.cfg without providing codepoints, the texts would still be unproperly rendered, especially under windows. Please try the steps given in my proposal for a better experience, and tell me whether you like the results or not.

Thanks in advance. :)
CloudiDust, the Simplified Chinese translation maintainer.
yma9
Posts: 10
Joined: November 8th, 2011, 11:19 am

Re: Japanese Font

Post by yma9 »

I have read that thread just now and tested as written in.
I seem it is improved certainly,and I think it's good default font with GPL full-compatible.
As you have guessed,I use MS-windows(ja) and apply OS's font to wesnoth.
(I heard OS license and this font designer grant using font without API on one non-commercial PC running OS)
So,I might be font-sensitive.
I think I say nothing anymore especially before 1.10.
Please try proceeding.
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