[XeTeX] can you advise me about Chinese fonts and xelatex?

[Wilfred van Rooijen]

Hi,

For what it's worth, OpenOffice comes 'standard' with a set of OTFs that include Chinese (AR) characters. I've used those quite succesfully in xelatex. My OpenOffice 3.0 on gentoo linux came with the following fonts (amongst others)

AR PL KaitiM Big5,文鼎ＰＬ中楷:style=Regular
AR PL SungtiL GB,文鼎ＰＬ简报宋:style=Regular
AR PL ZenKai Uni,文鼎PL中楷Uni:style=Medium
AR PL Mingti2L Big5,文鼎ＰＬ細上海宋:style=Reguler,Regular
AR PL ShanHeiSun Uni,文鼎PL細上海宋Uni,文鼎PL细上海宋Uni:style=Regular
AR PL KaitiM GB,文鼎ＰＬ简中楷:style=Regular

Since these OTFs are system-wide, you can use them in xelatex. Simply install OpenOffice on the same PC and you're ready to go!

Cheers,
Wilfred


--- On Tue, 1/20/09, Paul Johnson <pauljohn32 at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Paul Johnson <pauljohn32 at gmail.com>
> Subject: [XeTeX] can you advise me about Chinese fonts and xelatex?
> To: xetex at tug.org
> Date: Tuesday, January 20, 2009, 10:05 PM
> Greetings, people of XeTeX.
> 
> I don't speak/write Chinese, but I have students who do
> and they asked
> me to set up our computer lab so that they can use Chinese
> characters.
>  I wrestled with CJK-LaTeX and found Xelatex much more
> workable.  I'm
> running  Linux with and TeXLive 2007.  The xelatex version
> is
> 3.141592-0.996 (Web2C 7.5.6).
> 
> I've tested the Xelatex output with many different
> Chinese fonts.  I
> prepared a little writeup on how to compile documents in
> XeTeX using
> LyX, and posted it here:
> 
> http://pj.freefaculty.org/latex/xetex-3.pdf
> 
> If you scroll to the end, you see a sampling of characters
> from many font sets.
> 
> I wish the free/open fonts gave a nice result, but the
> students say
> neither the GNU Unicode nor the Unibit fonts (WenQuanYi Zen
> Hei) look
> quite right.  In fact, the students who are from China say
> the
> Bitstream Company's Cyberbit  font is the only one that
> actually looks
> like a document would in China.  I'm reluctant to tell
> them to use the
> Cyberbit font because of the licensing ambiguity that goes
> along with
> it. (That font is no longer offered by Bitstream and it is
> licensed
> only for noncommercial use.) Students say the font Ukai
> font is also
> fairly nice and might be used in China.
> 
> If I'm reading the web pages correctly, the GNU Unicode
> font is
> recently updated and improved, incorporating characters
> offered by the
> authors of the Unibit font.  The Unibit font website claims
> it is the
> state of the art. So why are the results not better?  
> Perhaps some of
> you can advise me if there is a way to make the unibit or
> GNU unifonts
> look less dark and blurry.  The GNU Unifont looks almost
> *bold* by
> comparison to the Cyberbit, that's one of the main
> objections against
> it from my students.  Is the version of Xelatex that I use
> likely to
> make a difference?
> 
> pj
> 
> -- 
> Paul E. Johnson
> Professor, Political Science
> 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
> University of Kansas
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