Find and install CJK fonts
There are two approaches for getting CJK fonts for a Linux system:
a) the system package manager
b) direct download from the Internet.
With a GUI-based Linux package manager, searches such as “Chinese fonts” or “Chinese TrueType” will identify packages that install Chinese TrueType fonts. Follow the usual package manager procedures to install any font packages.
Below is a list of some known Linux font packages, corresponding web sites and usage notes:
IPA Japanese Fonts
– Packages: fonts-ipafont-mincho, fonts-ipafont-gothic
– Font names: IPAexMincho, IPAMincho, IPAPMincho, IPAexGothic, IPAGothic, IPAPGothic
– http://ipafont.ipa.go.jp/#en
– License: IPA Open Font License
These fonts contain many (but, maybe, not all) characters for Chinese.
Un Korean Fonts
– Packages: fonts-unfonts-core
– Font names: UnBatang, UnBatangBold, UnDotum, UnDotumBold, UnGraphic, UnGraphicBold, UnPilgi, UnPilgiBold, UnGungseo
– http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/UN_fonts
– License: GPLv2 (this license may require your code to be open)
The link (above) is for a Fedora project page. It does contain a link to a Korean website (w/o English) for the Un fonts.
Droid Fonts
– Packages: fonts-droid
– Font names: Droid Sans Fallback, Droid Sans Japanese
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droid_fonts
– License: Apache License
“Droid Sans Fallback” has characters for Chinese, Japanese and Korean (in addition to Latin characters).
“Droid Sans Japanese” covers Japanese, but does not include Latin characters. This will make it unsuitable for use in many cases.
Google/Adobe Open CJK Fonts
– Packages:
– Font names: Noto Sans (aka “Adobe Han Sans”)
– https://code.google.com/p/noto
– License: Apache License 2.0
– Google provides the “Noto Sans” font in many different packages – most are intended for location-specific use (i.e. Latin + Arabic, Latin+Gujarati, etc.)
While Google does provide a full range of CJK fonts for Noto Sans, these fonts are in .OTF format with Postscript Type 1 glyphs. This format (.OTF w/PS Type1) is not recognized by Java and, thus, cannot currently be used with Qoppa’s java PDF Libraries. We are hopeful that Google will make changes at some point to fix this limitation.
Other CJK Fonts
There are many Linux packages with TrueType fonts for use with TeX. Often, these fonts can also be used directly with Qoppa’s Java PDF library.
More sources for CJK fonts can be found from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CJK_fonts
http://(host)/PDFToSVG/ListFonts servlet can be used to list all names (and limited CJK support information) for all system fonts on a web server. This can be used to find font names for use with PDFRenderHints.
Manual Font Installation in Linux
- Download and un-archive to get TrueType files with .ttf filename extension.
- Copy .ttf files to /usr/share/fonts/truetype directory
Restart the application using the Qoppa’s java library – this includes restarting web container applications (ex. Tomcat apps).
