Ubuntu 10 & 11 Chinese Setup

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Ubuntu 10 & 11 Chinese Fonts, LibreOffice/OpenOffice Features

Adding more fonts

Many people arrive here seeking more fonts for their Ubuntu system, so I've bumped this paragraph up to the top. I do periodic surveys of what's out there. See my page on the BabelStone Han project and other sources for free open source and commercial Chinese fonts.

Included Fonts

After you have completed the Chinese features installation for Ubutnu 10 or Ubuntu 11, on your font menus you'll find Chinese song, kai and ming Arphic public license fonts:

You'll also find WenQuanYi hei fonts hiding at the bottom here:

Ubuntu 11 includes even more WenQuanYi Chinese fonts, with 文泉驛 Chinese names!

Fonts with names ending in "CN" are in PRC GB encoding, while fonts with names ending in "TW" and "HK" are in Big 5 encoding. Font names ending in "MBE" include the Modern Bopomofo Extensions used in the teaching of Hakka and Minnan dialects instead of the Standard Bopomofo Extensions. The fonts with names ending in "Mono" include Latin characters "monospaced", with equal widths between each letter, instead of proportional spacing.

I assume the HK font includes the latest extensions to the Hong Kong Character Set (HKCS). For that font most will still need a Cantonese input method. You can download and install Cantonese via Synaptic (search for ibus-table-cantonese, ibus-table-jyutping, or scim-tables-zh) or you can use CantoInput which is a free Java app I have reviewed in my survey of third-party apps.

Other Chinese features in LibreOffice/OpenOffice:

Chinese translation (Tools > Language > Chinese translation) converts between simplified and traditional characters and vice-versa. It of course works better from traditional to simplified than in the opposite direction due to the larger number of possibilities.

Phonetic Guide (Format > Asian phonetic guide) will let you place Zhuyin or Pinyin pronunciation "ruby" text above or alongside your Chinese characters. You can select text in your document and it will appear in the Phonetic Guide, but LibreOffice & OpenOffice require you to type in those rubies by hand. To automatically generate Pinyin ruby text you may want to try a new open-source extension for OOo called OO Pinyin Guide. If that doesn't work well enough for you, I suggest you type out your Pinyin and then copy-and-paste it manually. The ibus-m17n package includes a Pinyin-with-tone-marks input method.

Asian typography — type those two words into the Help search index for information on setting rules for Asian text line breaks, sentence beginning/ending characters, hanging punctuation and automatically inserting a special space between characters.

Vertical text boxes — type that in the Help search index and then scroll down for information on vertical callouts (whatever they are) and vertical text boxes for Asian characters.

Previous pages:

Installing Chinese Features in Ubuntu 11
Installing Chinese Features in Ubuntu 10
Ubuntu 10 & 11 Input Methods (IME)

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