I have not set any font, but Japanese text is still not displayed correctly?

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fari

I have not set any font, but Japanese text is still not displayed correctly?

in General Discussion • Other • 2 months ago

In my sketch, I haven't set up any new font. It uses the default Sans Serif font (if I am not mistaken). But when it comes to Japanese or Arabic, it just gives empty blocks. I am trying to upload a screenshot, but it doesn't work here. Please follow this link to see the screenshot.

I will really appreciate to read your responses on this.

Replies(14)

PhiLho

Re: I have not set any font, but Japanese text is still not displayed correctly?

2 months ago

It just means that the default font doesn't support these characters. Try with a TrueType font supporting these characters, like Arial Unicode MS, MS Gothic, MS Mincho, MingLiU or others.

dimkir

Re: I have not set any font, but Japanese text is still not displayed correctly?

2 months ago

I have recently wrote a big post on Japanese/Kanji/Chinese fonts. May you find it useful, it's here

https://forum.processing.org/topic/japanese-characters-in-processing

fari

Re: I have not set any font, but Japanese text is still not displayed correctly?

2 months ago

I used Arial font in createFont(). Now I don't see any problem with any language. And I believe that Arial is present on almost every computer, so my sketch would work just fine.

fari

Re: I have not set any font, but Japanese text is still not displayed correctly?

2 months ago

I just realized that Arial works fine on Mac. But when I exported my application to Windows, it doesn't display Japanese characters.

Any suggestions please? :)

dimkir

Re: I have not set any font, but Japanese text is still not displayed correctly?

2 months ago

Arial doesn't include Japanese characters (as I wrote in https://forum.processing.org/topic/japanese-characters-in-processing)

but " Arial Unicode MS Regular" does. Or MingLiu

ps. also it is not correctly to assume that "Font XYZ would be avialble on almost every computer". The correct assumption is "There will be some machines that don't have my font XYZ installed, how can I make sure sketch runs there as well". To accomplish that you need to use PDE functionality to "Create Font" from the Tools \\ Create Font menu. This will create a .vlw font which should be included into your sketches data folder. However keep in mind that most fonts used in Windows / Mac (like Arial or Times) are by licence not allowed to be distributed with your sketch. You may want to find some free fonts.

pps. you may want to visit http://www.freejapanesefont.com/

fari

Re: Re: I have not set any font, but Japanese text is still not displayed correctly?

2 months ago

Thank you for the explanation and correction dimkir. I am not only concerned with Japanese, but other languages too. So what's the best choice for using only one font that can support almost all the characters? (i.e. japanese, english, russian, arabic, etc.)

I know I can include characters while creating the font, but I guess it will be a large file if I include all the characters?

PhiLho

Re: I have not set any font, but Japanese text is still not displayed correctly?

2 months ago

Arial Unicode MS has a large choice of characters, it will probably cover most of these languages.
But it is not free, if you want to include it in your sketch. You can put a .ttf file in the data folder, and use createFont'() from it. For large fonts, it is better than using a .vlw font, which indeed can become too big with too many characters. AFAIK, a VLW font has no problem of copyright / distribution (but IANAL; but I believe that's the motivation behind the creation of the file format), while a TTF font can have.
That said, as stated above, there are some free fonts trying to include lot of Unicode glyphs. Like Code2000.

fari

Re: Re: I have not set any font, but Japanese text is still not displayed correctly?

2 months ago

Thanks PhiLho. For now, I used Liberation font. As I have tested it so far, it works well (I have included .ttf font). And yeah, it is a free alternative to Arial.

dimkir

Re: I have not set any font, but Japanese text is still not displayed correctly?

2 months ago

@PhiLho

I guess VLW is just a "convenience" file format, so that it is easy to use fonts with Processing. However when you create a VLW with PDE font creator, you actually use another TTF or OTF font as a source font. Thus IMHO if one uses Arial as a source font and creates Arial.vlw this still violates licence of the original Arial font (because in the end of the day the glyphs still are going to be Arial glyphs). This is why I guess it is important to use free font from the very beginning.

As to Code2000 it seems to have Japanese Hiragana/Katakana characters, but I am not sure if it covers all chinese characters...

@fari:

The Liberation wiki page says:

The Liberation family supports only the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets, leaving out many writing systems. Extension to other writing systems is prevented by its unique licensing terms

which basically means that it WILL NOT have any of the Asian characters.

Also when you say

I am not only concerned with Japanese, but other languages too.

it raises questions as to: why do you need ALL characters of all languages? Usually "i want all" is a bad sign in software development. How are you going to use it?

fari

Re: Re: I have not set any font, but Japanese text is still not displayed correctly?

2 months ago

Thank you for the detailed explanation.

I am working with Twitter API and my application retrieves Tweets from everywhere in the world - and thus, I need the very many languages to show Tweets to the user. I cannot tell exactly what languages the users are using, and that's why I have to have a font that works well with most of the languages.

So far, I tested the Liberation font, and it works with Chinese, Russian, Arabic and Japanese characters. I will have to test it on other machines too. If it is not working then, I will have to consider using some other font.

dimkir

Re: I have not set any font, but Japanese text is still not displayed correctly?

2 months ago

Which exactly libration font did you use? I would like to have a free font which supports asian characters, however I tried https://fedorahosted.org/liberation-fonts/ they do not seem to contain Chinese or Arabic characters.

ps. when rendering remember that some fonts (like Arabic or Hebrew) have right-to-left reading order unlike western left-to-right.

PhiLho

Re: I have not set any font, but Japanese text is still not displayed correctly?

2 months ago

Again, IANAL, but using an image of a font is probably not a violation of the license of the font. Otherwise, if you use a font in an image (for making a meme, a logo, or similar usage), you wouldn't be allowed to show it without paying the license...

dimkir

Re: I have not set any font, but Japanese text is still not displayed correctly?

2 months ago

I found this http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/guide/fonts-basic-guide-to-font-licensing article about font licencing. But it's still unclear if making VLW off the TTF is considered to be "font used for preview" or considered as "making illegal copy" of the font.

fari

Re: I have not set any font, but Japanese text is still not displayed correctly?

2 months ago

I was mistaken. Liberation doesn't work on Windows. I switched back to Arial Unicode MS and it worked well for Japanese, Arabic, Russian, and more on Mac and Windows.

I will have to check the distribution license carefully. But for now, I cannot find any other solution to it.

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