Please add font to support Chinese

[Violin]

Apparently the current version of Warzone 2100 cannot display Chinese characters, as well as many other Asian languages. Please change or add font, to make a real multilingual game.
Thank you.

[Zarel]

I have a feeling this is a consequence of the font.conf changes.

We need [free] font that support every single language out there. Suggestions?

[Violin]

As for Chinese, Wen Quan Yi is good. http://wenq.org/enindex.cgi

[Zarel]

What's its license?

[Kaldera]

Comprehensive, and freeware for non-commercial use: bitstream cyberbit 29934 chars
More comprehensive, but shareware: code2000 more than 60k chars
Similar comprehensive, but not free (part of MS Office): Arial Unicode MS more than 50k chars

There are many Unicode fonts out there, but mostly only partial...

Will spend 5 Euros if code2000 comes with warzone
Maybe there will be an agreement?

Complete list of all 98884 unicode chars can be found here: http://www.decodeunicode.org/
Many fonts: http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts.html

[Thyranim]

i took a look on the sf-site, perhaps it's what you're asking for?

The aim of this project to provide open-source communities with the most complete, standard compliant, high-quality Chinese (CJK) fonts and resources. Outline and bitmap fonts at various sizes/styles will be developed and freely available to users.

SF

[Zarel]

Comprehensive, and freeware for non-commercial use: bitstream cyberbit 29934 chars

Not good enough. Warzone is GPL; we can only include fonts that are GPL-compatible (free for any use, share-alike)

Imagine if we used that font - then corporations could not play Warzone! Licensing is important.

[Violin]

I highly recommend WenQuanYi Zen Hei for Chinese. It's licensed under GPLv2. It has been chosen as the default Chinese font by Ubuntu, Fedora, Slackware, MagicLinux and CDLinux.
http://wenq.org/enindex.cgi?ZenHei(en)

[Kaldera]

Kaldera wrote: "Comprehensive, and freeware for non-commercial use: bitstream cyberbit 29934 chars"
Not good enough. Warzone is GPL; we can only include fonts that are GPL-compatible (free for any use, share-alike)

Imagine if we used that font - then corporations could not play Warzone! Licensing is important.

Sorry, but commercial use means to sell the game/parts of the game, use parts in other sold software, not to play in an corporational environment.
I am pretty sure, that playing the game has no commercial value.

So for every languagesystem an own font file?
Maybe an ingame option to choose the preferred font is a better solution. Chinese OS's should have some fonts to show the signs.

Violin, have you tried to change the font as described here: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2989 ?

[Zarel]

Sorry, but commercial use means to sell the game/parts of the game, use parts in other sold software, not to play in an corporational environment.
I am pretty sure, that playing the game has no commercial value.

Either way, under the GPL, it's currently legal to sell the game. We don't want to make it illegal just because one of our fonts says so.

So for every languagesystem an own font file?
Maybe an ingame option to choose the preferred font is a better solution. Chinese OS's should have some fonts to show the signs.

Violin, have you tried to change the font as described here: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2989 ?

Nah, a Unicode font with every single character would be preferable. The biggest problem is that, afaik, they're all proprietary. Until then, for Chinese, we can just use WenQuanYi Zen Hei, since it's GPLv2.

[cybersphinx]

Sorry, but commercial use means to sell the game/parts of the game,

"Commercial use" in the context of the GPL means mainly "include in a distribution that also sells on media". Which was also the reason not to include artwork under CC-NC licenses.

Nah, a Unicode font with every single character would be preferable.

But unlikely to happen (see http://www.unifont.org/fontguide/ for a list of free fonts, and under "Pan-Unicode Fonts" an explanation). I guess the "current" way works quite nice, add translations, and add a font if people complain about missing characters.

[Violin]

Zarel, you can check GNU Unifont.
http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html
Currently its Chinese part is actually WenQuanYi.

[cybersphinx]

Zarel, you can check GNU Unifont.

Which has great coverage, but is a 8x16/16x16 monospace bitmap font ("Pixels are drawn as outlined squares, so they scale to all point sizes").

[Violin]

I agree with cybersphinx. I think currently one single font doesn't look good for all languages. Déjà Vu is beautiful for English. I don't want it to be messed up. We just add some other font, and configure font substitution.

[Kaldera]

Maybe an ingame option to choose the preferred font is a better solution. Chinese OS's should have some fonts to show the signs.

Any comments to this?