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

[Paul Johnson]

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