I don't have time to thoroughly analyse this now, but I will quickly say that the missing character issue is related to Simplified vs Traditional. If you are writing traditional text with a simplified font (or simplified text with a traditional font), there will be some missing characters and get only those that are common to both sets. For fonts in the "songti" style, a freely available font I know is SimSun Founder Extended (but that's a huge font with something like 80000 characters for classical works and comprehensive dictionaries, most Chinese fonts have only a few thousand characters). I'll write something more later.<br>
<br>Andrew<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2009/1/21 Paul Johnson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:pauljohn32@gmail.com">pauljohn32@gmail.com</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Greetings, people of XeTeX.<br>
<br>
I don't speak/write Chinese, but I have students who do and they asked<br>
me to set up our computer lab so that they can use Chinese characters.<br>
I wrestled with CJK-LaTeX and found Xelatex much more workable. I'm<br>
running Linux with and TeXLive 2007. The xelatex version is<br>
3.141592-0.996 (Web2C 7.5.6).<br>
<br>
I've tested the Xelatex output with many different Chinese fonts. I<br>
prepared a little writeup on how to compile documents in XeTeX using<br>
LyX, and posted it here:<br>
<br>
<a href="http://pj.freefaculty.org/latex/xetex-3.pdf" target="_blank">http://pj.freefaculty.org/latex/xetex-3.pdf</a><br>
<br>
If you scroll to the end, you see a sampling of characters from many font sets.<br>
<br>
I wish the free/open fonts gave a nice result, but the students say<br>
neither the GNU Unicode nor the Unibit fonts (WenQuanYi Zen Hei) look<br>
quite right. In fact, the students who are from China say the<br>
Bitstream Company's Cyberbit font is the only one that actually looks<br>
like a document would in China. I'm reluctant to tell them to use the<br>
Cyberbit font because of the licensing ambiguity that goes along with<br>
it. (That font is no longer offered by Bitstream and it is licensed<br>
only for noncommercial use.) Students say the font Ukai font is also<br>
fairly nice and might be used in China.<br>
<br>
If I'm reading the web pages correctly, the GNU Unicode font is<br>
recently updated and improved, incorporating characters offered by the<br>
authors of the Unibit font. The Unibit font website claims it is the<br>
state of the art. So why are the results not better? Perhaps some of<br>
you can advise me if there is a way to make the unibit or GNU unifonts<br>
look less dark and blurry. The GNU Unifont looks almost *bold* by<br>
comparison to the Cyberbit, that's one of the main objections against<br>
it from my students. Is the version of Xelatex that I use likely to<br>
make a difference?<br>
<br>
pj<br>
<br>
--<br>
Paul E. Johnson<br>
Professor, Political Science<br>
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504<br>
University of Kansas<br>
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</blockquote></div><br>