Archive for 2005-11-16

Finally, with Funda Wang’s help, I’m uploading unifont to Mandriva repository — that means it will be the default font for Chinese in Mandriva 2007 release. And it looks like the progress is good on Debian and RedHat’s side too: Debian is unquestionable, as Arne is debian user (developer too? I don’t know). Leon Ho is active for RedHat’s I18N issues, so he will surely follow up too. It won’t be long for other distros to pick up.

But I found it absurd when I knew those CLE people are still pushing Firefly’s bitmap fonts. While I know Firefly has put a lot of effort on it (and deserves praise), I don’t think fonts not usable globally by all Chinese can be the solution, right now. This used to be so, when there exists no unified font for Chinese, and for various languages as well (Code2001 is ahead in this area, but doesn’t support CJK, and 2002 doesn’t come close); but right now why do they still push solutions that’s only usable by themselves? Even Wen Quan Yi recognized the need, and included Firefly’s bitmap fonts with Hong Kong freefonts as well.

I learned something, which is a rule rather than exception — discussion with perfectionist often leads to nowhere. Of course, no discussion at all is also bad, and I hate those kind of person really much, like some certain people killing my job in Mandrake build cluster repeatedly without telling me, and simply yell when I approach him. But the result of discussing with people with only perfection in mind (in particular, several such persons) is only: discussion. No result, no conclusion, no action, no whatsoever. So I will upload the fonts first, and let people to sort out license in the future — the only possible outcome for unifont can only be APL or GPL or duel license, there should not be any other choice. The license for these fonts has already generated enough discussion, and as usual, nobody has a conclusion for anything. I don’t want to waste my time anymore.