[OSM-dev] chinese font missing in mapnik

[Luka Frelih]

> Thanks for the info. We need some free fonts with better unicode 
> coverage, then. Any ideas? I tried RH Liberation fonts with the same 
> result  - [][] 
In Debian distro, chinese unicode fonts are in these packages:

i   ttf-arphic-ukai - "AR PL ZenKai Uni" Chinese Unicode TrueType font 
Kaiti style            
i   ttf-arphic-uming - "AR PL ShanHeiSun Uni" Chinese Unicode TrueType 
font Mingti style       

kai = more calligraphic
ming = more rectangular and uniform
actually the osmarender result on map right now is something else, 
sans-serif like and nice for maps in my opinion. i wonder what font is 
that.

The code2000 font is not free, its shareware (5$), but it contains 
around 60000 glyphs. If there is no option of having fallback for 
missing characters like browsers (and inkscape, it seems) do, it might 
be worth trying with it.
http://www.code2000.net/code2000_page.htm

The freefont project http://www.nongnu.org/freefont/ seems to cover many 
phonetic alphabets but not chinese ideographs.

I dont know of a free software unicode truetype font covering all scripts.

On the page pointed out by d tucny, the ntu-mr looks good to me, like 
sans serif and freely distributable, but it uses a big5 encoding, which 
might be another technical hurdle besides fallback.

LF