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[Bug 1346766] Re: Chinese in Ubuntu Touch should use Heiti style sans serif font

 

At this very moment, Source Sans is still not an option and there are
also questions to be answered to determine whether it fits the
requirement of DFSG.

Comparing wqy-microhei and fonts-droid, there is no reason to continue
using microhei anymore, because after several updates of Droid Sans, the
coverage problem is already improved (and wqy-microhei stops its
development right after this is the fact) to be wider than wqy-microhei.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1346766

Title:
  Chinese in Ubuntu Touch should use Heiti style sans serif font

Status in “ubuntu-touch-meta” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Ubuntu Touch uses Kaiti style font as the main UI font for displaying
  Chinese, which is not optimal as nowadays operating systems all use
  Heiti style font for the UI, we should really change it asap.

  Currently there are two choices on Ubuntu, fonts-droid and wqy-
  microhei. Below I will list out the pros and cons.

  wqy-microhei (DroidSansFallbackFull.ttf, modified):
  - Pros:
    - The advantage of wqy-microhei being its wider codepoint coverage, for example it also contains Japanese Kanas and Korean Hanguls in one font. The downside is it may be of lower quality than the original DroidSansFallbackFull.ttf due to its lack of maintenance in recent years.
  - Cons:
    - I am not too much in favour of using wqy-microhei, the reason being that it is basically a font that based on the Droid font (DroidSansFallbackFull.ttf to be exact).
    - Upstream has not updated wqy-microhei for long time, so it lacks any new updates from the Droid font, although it may not be obvious to users.
    - Another possible disadvantage of wqy-microhei is it includes more latin characters, which may result to inconsistent glyphs being used.

  fonts-droid (DroidSansFallbackFull.ttf, original):
  - Pros:
    - The advantage is it has coverage of CJK ext. A [1], which wqy-microhei does not provide.
  -Cons:
   - On the other hand, wqy-microhei has added some glyphs that the droid font does not provide, I don't have the exact number of that but I believe it's just a small number.
   - The disadvantage is it does not include Korean Hangul, which can be remedied with another Korean font, and it's not our current concern anyway.

  As an additional alternative, just a few days ago, Google released the
  Noto Sans CJK fonts [2][3]:

  fonts-noto (Noto Sans CJK fonts):
  - Pros:
    - It takes care of different writing standard of Traditional and Simplified Chinese
    - It covers Japanese and Korean as well
  - Cons:
    - Needs to be tested
    - Bigger size than the other alternatives as a result of catering for both Traditional and Simplified Chinese
    - Not yet packaged [4]

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs_Extension_A
  [2] http://googledevelopers.blogspot.de/2014/07/noto-cjk-font-that-is-complete.html
  [3] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1xIBCsqwrSxowmLQS7kJm9gM58-FmOIYlZWoRlgqtqE4/edit#slide=id.g36327fada_643
  [4] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=754926

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References