Obtaining Chinese Font

A properly installed Chinese font is required to view the Chinese calendar on-line. For older versions of Netscape, you also have to set the font preference to use it. If you don't have Chinese font installed, you can try the following:

• For Windows platform:

  First try to view the View Chinese Calendar page or the traditional characters version with Internet Explorer. Your version of Windows may automatically install Chinese support for you. If that is not successful, please read on.

  Windows 2000, Windows XP and later have native support for Chinese. You just need to change the "Regional (and Language) Options" in control panel to add Chinese support for both reading and input. If you are using Windows 2000 or Windows XP, you can also get the SimSun-18030 font by downloading the GB18030 Support Package from Microsoft. For older versions of Windows, the easiest way probably is to get a Microsoft Office CD-ROM. For Office 97 or older versions, look at the valuepack and choose fareast support. Then install the simplified and/or traditional Chinese font. For Office 2000 and later, both simplified and traditional Chinese fonts are included, just open a document with Chinese characters, for example, a saved copy of the View Chinese Calendar page, and follow prompts to load the Chinese support if that has not be done previously.

  Another place to get Chinese support from Microsoft is to go to office.microsoft.com and search for Chinese language pack. You can also use the Arial Unicode MS font that comes with Microsoft Office. That font has the largest collection of characters including Chinese among many other languages.

  There are also True Type Chinese fonts from non-Microsoft sources, such as the Arphic fonts that are normally bundled with Linux distributions, which also work on Windows.

• For UNIX platforms running X Windows:

  Both 16x16 (hanzigb16st, hanzigb16fs) and 24x24 (hanzigb24st) simplified Chinese fonts are part of the X11R6 distribution. So, they can be downloaded from ftp.x.org or any mirrors. Just go to pub/individual/font folder to get the font-isas-misc-*.tar.gz and font-alias-*.tar.gz tar balls. The tar balls also come with configure and install scripts. You can see if they work for you. For manual installation, you need the three gb*.bdf font files from the first tar ball and the misc/fonts.alias file from the second. As for traditional Chinese fonts, they are not in standard X11 distribution so you probably need to do a search to find out where to download them. Go to a web search engine such as Google and type in "taipei24.bdf", you should be able to find places to download that and fonts of other sizes if you want to. However, only system administrator can install new fonts for the whole system. So you may have to ask him or her to do it.

  If you just want to add a private font directory of Chinese fonts, you can try the 'xset fp+ /your/font/path/here' command substituting the proper font path and add it to the .xinitrc file for automatic execution of the command when you are sure it is working correctly. One big catch is to have the correct font format and proper information files under that font path. Unfortunately, different flavors of UNIX systems tend to use somewhat different font formats especially if your machine is already several years old. But they all should have commands to convert the BDF fonts to native format. Some may also take BDF fonts directly. Check with your system administrator for these information. Also, you can get some ideas of the native font format by looking at the system font path which is usually at /usr/lib/X11/fonts or /usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts or a similar place. The good news is that most recent systems adopt the PCF font format. If you see many .pcf, .pcf.Z or .pcf.gz files under the misc subdirectory, yours is one of them and you can try the following approach to see if it works for you, using simplified fonts as an example:

  First make a fonts subdirectory under your home directory and move the three gb*.bdf files and the fonts.alias file to it. Edit the fonts.alias file to remove all except the three lines start with hanzigb. Then under that directory do the following ($ stands for command prompt):
  

  $ bdftopcf -o gb16fs.pcf gb16fs.bdf
  $ bdftopcf -o gb16st.pcf gb16st.bdf
  $ bdftopcf -o gb24st.pcf gb24st.bdf
  

  If the fonts under the system font path are compressed, e.g. ending with .Z or .gz, you can compress the fonts with respectively
  

  $ compress *.pcf
  or
  $ gzip *.pcf
  

  The next step is:
  

  $ mkfontdir
  

  which should generate the fonts.dir file. Now use the xset command described above to add the font path:
  

  $ xset fp+ /your/home/directory/fonts
  

  Finally check if the fonts have been added successfully with:
  

  $ xlsfonts |grep gb
  

  If you see several lines ending with "-gb2312.1980-0" and lines of hanzigb*, congratulations! You have just successfully installed the Chinese fonts and you can add the xset command to the .xinitrc file under your home directory for automatic adding of the fonts. You may also remove the *.bdf files if you want to conserve some disk space.

Back to Make Your Own Chinese Calendar

Home | EPS | HTML | PNG/JPEG | PDF | XML | Design | Annotate | Software