TrueType Fonts for Asian Languages

TrueType is a digital font technology consisting of TrueType fonts and the rasterizer. A TrueType font is a data file containing glyphs, the shape/outline of the characters. In addition to the shape/outline of the characters, it contains information such as character to glyph mapping tables, hinting properties, and other information needed to generate the bitmap images for the characters. The rasterizer is a program that reads the font file to generate the bitmap images for display and printer devices.

Summary of Change

The HP-UX 11i v1.6 release provides TrueType fonts for HP-UX supported Asian languages/locales including Japanese, Korean and Chinese (both Simplified and Traditional).

Details of Change

Providing TrueType fonts support on HP-UX enables X Windows System based, Java based, and Internet based applications to render language-based text correctly. The fonts can be used to download the glyphs to the printer for printing language-based text. The TrueType fonts are scalable. This enables the user(s) to scale the font glyphs to the desired size.

The following table shows the list of Asian TrueType fonts:

Table 9-1 Asian TrueType Fonts

Language	Typefaces/Family Names
Japanese	HGMinchoL HGGothicB
Korean	HYBatang HYDotum HYGulim HYGungsuh
Chinese (Simplified)	ZYCJKHei ZYCJKSun
Chinese (Traditional)	ARMingtiL ARMingtiLHK

To make use of the TrueType fonts new mapping tables, tables that map local font indexing to Unicode font indexing have been added.

In addition to these new fonts and mapping tables, CDE has provided enhancements to the config file used by the X Font Server to locate the fonts installed on the system. This enables the applications to get the glyph/character patterns automatically from the X Font Server.

Impact

Size requirements regarding disk space:

Table 9-2 Disk Space Size Requirements for Asian TrueType Fonts

TrueType Fonts	Size
Japanese	32MB
Korean	71MB
Chinese (Simplified)	39MB
Chinese (Traditional)	41MB

The TrueType fonts in the X Window environment is available only through the X Font Server, xfs. To establish a host as a font server, start xfs as follows:

/usr/bin/X11/xfs -port 7000 -daemon

See the xfs(1) manpage for more details.

To ensure that the host is always configured to be font server upon reboots, change the line in /etc/rc.config.d/xfs to:

RUN_X_FONT_SERVER=1

To configure a host to use a font server (that is to configure your system as font client), run xset command as follows:

xset +fp tcp/[hostname]:7000

See the xset(1) manpage for more details.

Compatibility

No compatibility issues.

Performance

Applications using TrueType fonts should have the same performance as when using bitmap fonts.

Obsolescence

Not applicable.

Documentation

The manpages that have been updated are:

xfs(1)
xset(1)