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

[Andrew Moschou]

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.

Andrew

2009/1/21 Paul Johnson <pauljohn32 at gmail.com>

> 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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