Traditional Chinese
- Translation of OLPC webpage in Traditional Chinese
Free Chinese Font
Arphic PL Font
In 1999, a Taiwan font company, Arphic technology, donated four TrueType fonts to the Open Source community under the Arphic public license. These four fonts consist of two Sung type face (宋體) and two Kai type face (楷體) each for Traditional (正體) and Simplified (簡體) Chinese.
Filename Font Family Font Family # of glyphs bkai00mp.ttf AR PL KaitiM Big5 文鼎ＰＬ中楷 Big5 (14148) bsmi00lp.ttf AR PL Mingti2L Big5 文鼎ＰＬ細上海宋 Big5 (14148) gkai00mp.ttf AR PL KaitiM GB 文鼎ＰＬ簡中楷 GB2312 (7764) gbsn00lp.ttf AR PL SungtiL GB 文鼎ＰＬ簡報宋 GB2312 (7764)
Firefly Sung
Later as anti-alias widely used, people start getting trouble reading small sized characters due to the complicated strokes of Chinese. An easy solution would be using a bitmap embedded font. But the available Chinese bitmap fonts are of only 16x16 and 24x24 pixels. In 2004, a Taiwanese OSS writer, Firefly, completed a new set of 12~16 bitmap font based on the above four Arphic fonts. He merged Traditional and Simplified Chinese glyphs and embedded the manually optimized bitmap fonts into a single TTF, which is known as fireflysung.ttf, which consists of 16976 glyphs.
http://cle.linux.org.tw/fonts/FireFly/
Firefly keeps updating this work and in 2007 he released a significant new version which consists of both mono spaced and proportional width styles. About 1222 new glyphs are added and 7332 new bitmap updated. This new version now covers Big5(正體中文)、GB2312(簡體中文)、JISX0208(日文) encodings and re-named as OpenDesktop Font.
CJKUnifonts
A German, Arne Götje, who lives in Taiwan works on a project to provide CJK unicode fonts. His work is also based on the Arphic fonts:
- 文鼎PL上海宋Uni (AR PL ShanHeiSun Uni)
- 文鼎PL中楷Uni (AR PL ZenKai Uni)
In spite of the original Arphic font glyphs, he further add the Chinese dialect phonetic symbols. As later the firefly sung released, he merged the embedded bitmap fonts into CJKUnifonts. In 2005, the work of Hong Kong freefonts project is also included.
http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/CJKUnifonts
Wen-Quan-Yi Bitmap Font
This is a new wiki based font developing initiated by FangQ. Based on the work of Firefly, this work extends the coverage of 11x11, 12x12, 14x14, 15x16 pixel sized bitmapt fonts to include the Unicode CJK 20,902 unified characters and ext. A region. Also, 10x10, 13x13 and 16x16 sized fonts are currently under heavy developing.
A new TrueType font is under development with the same approach. The everyday nightly build can be d/l from here:
See also Fonts.
Firefly bitmap fonts (best for low-resolution disp.) covers both Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese
Also, a font company, Arphic(文鼎), donated two fonts containing both traditional and simplified Chinese. Mr. Firefly (螢火飛) combines these two fonts, converted into unicode base and embeded bitmap font (新宋體). It's now widedly used in Chinese Linux community. Another font project, wen-quan-yi (文泉驛), is also based on firefly font.
Input Methods
See also Input methods
Several hundred input methods for Chinese have been developed. The scim (Smart Common Input Method) platform provides the following Input Method Editors for Traditional Chinese.
- Wu
- Array30
- CNS11643
- Cangjie
- Cangjie 3
- Cangjie 5
- Canton HK
- Cantonese Pinyin
- Dayi3
- EasyBig
- Jyutping
- Quick
- Simplex
- Stroke 5
- ZhuYin
- ZhuYin Big
Among the most popular for Traditional Chinese are Cangjie and Zhuyin-Hanzi conversion.
- CANG-JIE input method (Cangjie Method 倉頡)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 手 田 水 口 廿 卜 山 戈 人 心 日 尸 木 火 土 竹 十 大 中 片 重 難 金 女 月 弓 一 , . /
Cangjie is shape-based. It uses twenty-four familiar characters, each of which stands for a set of related shapes. All but a few Chinese characters can be readily broken up into pieces within that relatively small set of shapes. From that sequence of shapes, no more than five will be selected, by regular rules, to form the code for typing the character. For example, the character 明 is broken into 日 and 月. For the few characters that are too complex for this process, there is a system of three-element abbreviations, each including the character 難 (difficult). There are numerous books in Chinese on Cangjie, but little information in English.
- Phonetic input method (Zhuyin 注音)
ㄅ ㄉ ˇ ˋ ㄓ ˊ ˙ ㄚ ㄞ ㄢ ㄦ = ㄆ ㄊ ㄍ ㄐ ㄔ ㄗ ㄧ ㄛ ㄟ ㄣ [ ㄇ ㄋ ㄎ ㄑ ㄕ ㄘ ㄨ ㄜ ㄠ ㄤ ; ㄈ ㄌ ㄏ ㄒ ㄖ ㄙ ㄩ ㄝ ㄡ ㄥ
Zhuyin, also called Bopomofo from its first four letters, is a Chinese alphabet made of greatly simplified character forms. It is used in elementary school textbooks in Chinese-speaking countries, in dictionaries, and in IMEs for Traditional Chinese. The corresponding phonetic input method for Simplified Chinese uses Pinyin Romanization.
Input Method Editor engines for Traditional Chinese Linux all support Cangjie, Pinyin, and Zhuyin. Engines for Simplified Chinese all support Pinyin and Wubi, a different shape-based IME. Chinese IME software for Linux includes IIIMF, scim, xcin, chinput, and methods built into the Yudit and emacs editors.