183372 - XFree86 provides "*-big5hkscs-0" rather than "*-hkscs-1" for Big5-HKSCS font

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Internationalization, defect)

Description

[Anthony Fok]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 Thiz; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20021127
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 Thiz; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20021127

Big5-HKSCS fonts are provided as XLFD "*-big5hkscs-0" rather than "*-hkscs-1" on
XFree86.  A patch to add "big5hkscs-0" is attached.  :-)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Anthony Fok]

Attachment: Patch to add XLFD "big5hkscs-0" encoding support

Hello Shanjian,

I have tested it on my system, and it works. 
("Edit->Preference->Appearance->Font Settings->Traditional Chinese" now shows
*-big5hkscs-0 fonts too.

By the way, I also changed "hkscs-1" to use TT_OS2_CPR1_CHINESE_TRAD instead of
TT_OS2_CPR1_CHINESE_SIMP.  Please let me know if that change is okay.  :-) 
Thanks!

Anthony

Comment 2

[Roland Mainz]

Anthony Fok:
Can you attach a bitmap font in the "big5hkscs-0"-encoding incl. matching
"fonts.dir" index for verification, please ?

Comment 3

[Anthony Fok]

Hello Roland,

Thank you for looking into this.  Unfortunately, I do not have any big5hkscs-0
bitmap font here.  (Probably the GNU/Linux Chinese community will eventually
start a project to make one.)  Meanwhile, what I do have are:

 * /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/zh_HK.big5hkscs/*.  The XLC_LOCALE therein was
created by fellow Chinese developer Roger So some years ago.  That is the origin
of the use of *-big5hkscs-0 on XFree86 and Linux systems.

 * Big5-HKSCS TrueType fonts.  The ones I have are proprietary by 3rd parties,
so I probably can't give it to you.  Instead, you may download one from here, a
rather high-quality sample Big5-HKSCS (and CJK + CJK A) TrueType font by DynaLab:

    http://www.iso10646hk.net/download/DFSongSd.ttf

(Note: The web page says it is for personal use only; can't be resold; not for
commercial use, etc., but I suppose using it for testing is just fine.)

We use X-TT ('load "xtt"' module in XFree86) for rendering such fonts.  I
suppose the 'load "freetype"' module would work too.  Note that big5hkscs-0.enc
is not yet officially submitted to XFree86, so probably only X-TT would work here.

As for the fonts.dir file, it may look something like this:

2
bmin00l.ttf -arphic-ar mingti light b5-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-c-0-big5-0
bmin00l.ttf -arphic-ar mingti light b5-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-c-0-big5hkscs-0

So yes, depending on your system configuration, it may take a bit of effort to
get your environment to properly display Big5-HKSCS fonts.  But yes, be rest
assure that we in the Hong Kong Linux community use "big5hkscs-0", and Linux
distributions like Thiz Linux Desktop, Turbolinux China, Chinese 2000, began
supporting Big5-HKSCS about a year ago, using "*-big5hkscs-0" fonts.  We have
been using "*-hkscs-1" in fonts.alias too, but that shouldn't have been
necessary.  Anyhow, since I mentioned to Roger So a year ago that I was going to
look into extending hkscs.uf and hkscs.ut, Roger has urged me to patch Mozilla
to recognize "big5hkscs-0", so finally, here I am.  :-)

Why didn't we use "hkscs-1" in the first place?  Here are a few reasons:

  * Roger implemented "big5hkscs-0" before he heard of "hkscs-1" on Solaris (my
guess).

  * We feel that "*-big5hkscs-0" is a more appropriate name because HKSCS is a
character set that may be encoded either as Unicode/ISO 10646, or as an
extension to Big-5.  That's why the Hong Kong government registered the
Big5-encoded version of HKSCS as "Big5-HKSCS".  The name "hkscs-1" does not
reflect that the font is Big5-encoded.  So, even now that we see that Solaris
uses "hkscs-1", we Hong Kong Chinese Linux developers want to stick with
"big5hkscs-0".

Cheers,

Anthony

Comment 4

[Shanjian Li]

The change make sense to me. I would like to have brian take a look at this. 

Comment 5

[kill this account]

this looks okay to me

Comment 6

[Shanjian Li]

assign to myself.

Comment 7

[Christopher Blizzard (:blizzard)]

Comment on attachment 108133 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch to add XLFD "big5hkscs-0" encoding support

sr=blizzard

Comment 8

[Shanjian Li]

Comment on attachment 108133 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch to add XLFD "big5hkscs-0" encoding support

This should be a very safe change, and it only affect chinese display for
Hongkong on *nix.

Comment 9

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Comment on attachment 108133 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch to add XLFD "big5hkscs-0" encoding support

a=asa for checkin to 1.3a

Comment 10

[Roger So]

Hi guys, this is Roger So here. :)

I can confirm that this patch works beautifully.

Regarding the use of big5hkscs-0: yes, Anthony is correct.  Thanks Anthony, you
summed it all up better than I could!

Comment 11

[Shanjian Li]

fix checked in. Thanks to Anthony for his great work.

Comment 12

[Yuying Long]

Is there some one can help verify this fix in latest trunk build? otherwise
please provide some steps to me to verify.  Thanks!