Some issues when making Adobe Source Han Sans as default Chinese fonts

[epico]

The new Adobe Source Chinese fonts are great!
I plan to use the Adobe Source Han Sans as default Chinese fonts for Fedora 21.

After discussion, I found an issue about non-monospaced English characters.

In Fedora, we usually provide one font for each language.
So we also use this font as default monospace font on Linux terminal.

But the English characters are not monospaced, which the Linux terminal can't handle it.

From terminal spec, the terminal can handle dual-width fonts gracefully.
Chinese characters are handled correctly, but some English characters like "@" will overlap other characters.

Could you make the English characters monospaced?
Or add a new font with monospaced English characters to the zip archive?

Here are the screenshots for Linux terminal.

[miguelsousa]

Can you use Source Code Pro for the English?

[epico]

I am the Chinese font maintainer of Fedora.

Yes, I can prepend an English fonts in fontconfig conf file.
But this approach may break some legacy applications, which is not allowed in Fedora Packaging.

We removed all binding="strong" from nearly all fonts in Fedora to fix the legacy applications, which is needed for English font prepend to take effects.

From the screenshot, maybe only a few glyphs needs adjustment.
English characters are okay, but "@" has the problem.
Do you need a list of English characters which needs fixes?

[miguelsousa]

I think that the problem is with the Linux Terminal and not with the fonts. If you look closely at your screenshot, you'll see that only the @ and the numbers are set in Source Han Sans. All the letters in the prompt line (e.g. epico, Desktop) are from some other font.

[epico]

Sorry, I make some mistake in the previous screenshot.
Please check the new one, thanks:

[miguelsousa]

You're trying to use a proportional width font in an environment that requires a mono width font.
Source Hans Sans is not going to work for you. I think your only options are:

• use a different font
• use Source Han Sans for the CJK characters, and Source Code Pro for all the other characters
• hire a font designer to modify Source Han Sans to suit your needs

[kenlunde]

This is a DIY (Do It Yourself) issue, because the glyphs for half-width ASCII are present in the font, but are not encoded by default. They are accessible via the 'hwid' GSUB feature. If you want them to be encoded by default, the source UTF-32 CMap resource needs to be modified, and you then rebuild the OpenType font, being sure to specify the modified UTF-32 CMap resources as the argument of the "-ch" command-line option. The modification is simple. Change the following line:

<00000020> <0000007e> 1

To this:

<00000020> <0000007e> 63039

That will map the range U+0020 through U+007E to CIDs 63039 through 63133, which are the glyphs for half-width ASCII.

[epico]

Thanks very much for the information!
I will have a try.

[epico]

I tried the changes, it works!

Are you willing to encode the half-width ASCII in monospace fonts?
We need to package Chinese fonts in Fedora Linux.

URL:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/package/adobe-source-han-sans-cn-fonts/
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/package/adobe-source-han-sans-twhk-fonts/

[kenlunde]

I knew that it would work. ☺

We are considering this at the moment. See: https://code.google.com/p/noto/issues/detail?id=136