Default japanese font for Ubuntu 14.04 is wrong

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

On 2014-12-23 14:33, jitsumi at gmail.com wrote:
> On 2014-11-11 22:27, Gunnar Hjalmarsson wrote:
>> On a fresh non-Japanese install, the package fonts-takao-pgothic is 
>> available. However, so is the package fonts-droid, and since the
>> "Droid Sans Fallback" font is kind of 'featured', it probably takes
>> precedence over "TakaoPGothic" for rendering Japanese contents.
> 
> Yes, I think it's exactly the problem I have. The "Droid  Sans Fallback"
> display the kanjis in a very weird way. The "TakaoPGothic" is rendering the
> kanjis correctly. (Still, I don't think it is perfect, because, it
> render them with big
> space between them). The package ttf-vlgothic (apprently renamed
> fonts-vlgothic)
> was installing a very good font. But i don't know the name of this font,
> so i can not
> check.
> 
> What I mean by "default" font, it is if yes or not the standard shape
> and number of the strokes
> in a kanji are respected. If you compar these kanjis (究 乗 降 語 換 違
> 雑 誌) rendered in "Droid  Sans Fallback"
> and in "TakaoPGothic" you will see many small differences. But this
> differences are actually huge, a japanese person
> will judge that the kanji is written wrongly.
> 
> To Gunnar Hjalmarsson and Mitsuya Shibata
> 
> I would like to have correct rendering of japanese kcharacters without
> having my full system in Japanese (I'm learning Japanese, but I don't
> yet understand it)

As long as fonts-droid is used for Chinese in the way it is, I can't
think of a default configuration right now which would achieve that.
Some kind of personal configuration changes will be needed.

> Also, a solution was given to me by Kazushi on askubuntu.com
> <http://askubuntu.com> there
> http://askubuntu.com/questions/536462/defautl-kanji-japanese-font-wrong-in-ubuntu-14-04-how-to-change-it/537789#537789
> (His answer about copying 69-language-selector-ja-jp.conf
> <https://github.com/wzssyqa/language-selector-im-config/blob/master/fontconfig/69-language-selector-ja-jp.conf>)

Well, that Ask Ubuntu answer includes a couple of misconceptions, but it
indeed provides a couple of solutions.

I think that the single step which made fonts-droid interfere with
TakaoPGothic (or other Japanese fonts) was the introduction of
65-droid-sans-fallback.conf as a fix of https://launchpad.net/bugs/1227034
Hence another possible solution (provided that you don't care too much
about Chinese rendering) might be to either disable that fontconfig file
by removing the symlink:

sudo rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/65-droid-sans-fallback.conf

or remove the whole fonts-droid package:

sudo apt-get purge fonts-droid

(untested)

-- 
Gunnar Hjalmarsson
https://launchpad.net/~gunnarhj