I have a problem with bold fonts in X applications (firefox, gaim): When I display Chinese text in bold, it's not readable because it's so blurred, even at relatively high font sizes (72pt still almost unreadable). Here's what I know: 1) It is possibly related to freetype: when I mess with ~.fonts.conf and make the AR PL KaitiM Big5 family font emboldened, the characters unreadable (they all become bold and blurry) (bold side by side with the match/assigned one looks the same). It is also interesting to notice that if I try to set embolden to false for the same font, it doesn't affect the already bold/blurry characters, for some reason I can only affect regular characters. 2) It's probably not related to my WM (xfce-4.3.90). I get the same results in plain X without any window manager loaded. The reason I include this tidbit is because XFCE has an option to enable anti-aliasing and hinting (possibly a GTK2 tweak?), but despite any changes to that setting, I still have the same problem. 3) I have freetype-2.1.10-r2 (build with USE=bindist, tested without bindist also) and 1.3.X installed (the later is a dep of gfontview). I am using the latest arphicfonts in ~x86 (also tried x86), and I do most of my testing with AR PL KaitiM Big5. Other Chinese fonts have the same problem though: firefly-sung, MS ISO1046, etc.. 4) I use en_US.UTF-8 locale settings. 5) Allegedly, on FreeBSD freetype has a CJK patch. I'm not sure if it fixes this problem in particular, but a friend of mine running FreeBSD with the same fonts and patched freetype does not have this problem. Here's the output from emerge --info: app-admin/eselect-compiler: [Not Present] dev-java/java-config: [Not Present] dev-lang/python: 2.4.3-r1 dev-python/pycrypto: 2.0.1-r5 dev-util/ccache: [Not Present] dev-util/confcache: [Not Present] sys-apps/sandbox: 1.2.17 sys-devel/autoconf: 2.13, 2.59-r7 sys-devel/automake: 1.4_p6, 1.5, 1.6.3, 1.7.9-r1, 1.8.5-r3, 1.9.6-r2 sys-devel/binutils: 2.16.1-r3 sys-devel/gcc-config: 1.3.13-r3 sys-devel/libtool: 1.5.22 virtual/os-headers: 2.6.17-r1 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86" AUTOCLEAN="yes" CBUILD="i386-pc-linux-gnu" CFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium4m -fomit-frame-pointer" CHOST="i386-pc-linux-gnu" CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/share/X11/xkb /usr/share/texmf/dvipdfm/config/ /usr/share /texmf/dvips/config/ /usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/config/ /usr/share/texmf/tex/plat ex/config/ /usr/share/texmf/xdvi/" CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/env.d /etc/gconf /etc/revdep-rebuild /etc/terminfo" CXXFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium4m -fomit-frame-pointer" DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles" FEATURES="autoconfig distlocks metadata-transfer sandbox sfperms strict" GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://gentoo.chem.wisc.edu/gentoo/ http://gentoo.mirrors.pair.com" LANG="en_US.UTF-8" LINGUAS="" MAKEOPTS="-j4" PKGDIR="/usr/portage//packages/x86/" PORTAGE_RSYNC_OPTS="--recursive --links --safe-links --perms --times --compress --f orce --whole-file --delete --delete-after --stats --timeout=180 --exclude='/distfil es' --exclude='/local' --exclude='/packages'" PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp" PORTDIR="/usr/portage/" SYNC="rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage" USE="X alsa berkdb cjk crypt dlloader doc elibc_glibc gnutls gtk2 hardened input_de vices_keyboard input_devices_mouse iproute2 jpeg kernel_linux mmx mng nls nptl nptl -only offensive opengl pam pcmcia pcre pic png posix python readline sasl skey spel l sse sse2 ssl startup-notification tcpd tiff truetype unicode userland_GNU userloc ales video_cards_radeon x86 xcomposite xorg zlib" Unset: CTARGET, EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS, INSTALL_MASK, LC_ALL, LDFLAGS, PORTAGE_RSYNC_ EXTRA_OPTS, PORTDIR_OVERLAY
have you tried some of the other fonts that have chinese characters? i use hkscs-ming which has good coverage of traditional chinese characters. also firefly-sung is another apparently good one. ideally we'd import more patches from the gentoo-cn and gentoo-tw overlays, but we have a lack of manpower at the moment.
I've tried many fonts, and I don't think this is related to the actual font package being used. It seems to be related to the anti-aliasing subsystem or something of that nature (a seemingly poorly documented part of X related to fontconfig I suppose). What it looks like is most chinese font packages don't provide boldface or something. If I try to make bold fonts in something like abiword, nothing happens. Applications that use some other form of emboldening, tend to have too much blurring or antialiasing on Chinese fonts; the strokes are too fat to be that close to each other, resulting in unreadable blobs. I suppose this is controllable by some kind of fontconfig directive, but the solution is not clear.
It fixed itself during an emerge -uD world.
