Design theory: web page Chinese font typesetting design

The problem of Chinese font embedding in TeX typesetting and the Chinese font design in informal language

Original: Http://yulewang.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!5C815C994ABB661E!262.entry

Children below the age of 18 please do not read this article, will be scared. If you are in contact with Chinese font companies, please tell them the questions I have described.

After the composition, in Shanghai, a little break, in addition to eating and drinking and shopping, and was abused by the tutor to write articles, their own look at the G-word, is to try to solve the Chinese Tex users have complained about in the past few years about the PDF document produced by Tex appears too thin.

This is the case in point. A long time ago, we all need to use dvips or DVIPDFM to convert TeX-generated DVI files to PDF files, this path is cumbersome, the need to convert a Chinese trueype font to about 100 Type1 fonts, and then the subfont of these fonts to embed Document. Cho, a mathematician in South Korea, was not satisfied with this situation in TeX, so he wrote an extension of the DVIPDFM program called DVIPDFMX. DVIPDFMX can embed CID's TrueType and OpenType fonts directly, do not need to split the font into many subfont, resulting in a small PDF file, and more than the original method in the reader rendering faster, high quality. As a result, China and Japan and South Korea users love. But for a long time, Chinese users have complained that the document, seemingly produced by DVIPDFMX, appears to be hollow and heavily influenced by Adobe's official Acrobat reader, while the same fonts, if not DVIPDFMX, such as the use of Cairo, Quartz or word2007, the resulting PDF has no such problem. If the article is all Chinese, it's just hard to read. And if the Chinese and English are mixed in the line, and the English part is more normal, for example, using the Times font or Palatino font, the entire type block appears mottled, a look at the outstanding English, so all along, we have advised users to use the original thin to the default Computer modern fonts to make the document not maladjusted.

In the past few years, no one has studied the issue seriously, South Korean users feel that DVIPDFMX produced a good PDF quality, because they use a customized distribution of the Ktug version of the original is more coarse, and Chinese users if the use of Windows in the song of the company, that is SimSun, is quite unable to endure, founder of the font, such as book song, then slightly better, but how good but Adobe's OpenType font adobe Songti Std Light. A few years ago, Jjgod classmate wrote an article compared to dozens of Chinese fonts, he is using the results of DVIPDFMX output visual effects to evaluate the quality of the font, the result of a pretty good font, Fangzheng song, due to the display in the reader is too meticulous, he thought as founder of the song. And a few years later, the problem was generalized, today, Tex is moving towards internationalization, today's Tex has supported Unicode and a variety of advanced font format, but also a full range from the DVI era to the PDF era, the two hot-hyped TeX engine, are related to DVIPDFMX. XeTeX directly used a variant of the DVIPDFMX, XDVIPDFMX to produce PDFs, while LuaTeX, instead of DVIPDFMX code, replaces parts of the original pdfTeX code to produce PDFs. This leads to the current all advanced TeX system, in the CID font embedding code, is a close relationship, all the resulting Chinese pdf, are outrageous, LuaTeX especially.

Last year and this year, I have been using the LuaTeX engine and context format, writing a variety of documents including papers, in the use of the process, found a lot of problems, began to communicate with developers. For months, many bugs were reported, some of which were also patched. In addition, I discussed with the context developer Hans and other TeX experts to try to get the latest context and LuaTeX to support Chinese typography. Other things include the TeX binaries for the FreeBSD operating system for users in the context. Therefore, I and LuaTeX and the developer of the context (in fact, the same person), have a very frequent contact, but also maintain a good relationship with each other. Developers are also diligent in fixing the bugs I report, which makes it possible for me to use the software to make a variety of documents (academic papers, technical documents). After I finished my composition this year, I could take a break for a while, and since LuaTeX's developers have just finished a new feature, Mplib and have free time. Therefore, we have time to discuss and solve this long-standing problem.

I started by writing to LuaTeX's developer, Taco Hoekwater, not writing to DVIPDFMX developer Cho, because I was familiar with him, and Taco the two years, diligently write the code, I am more convinced that his problem-solving efficiency. Sometimes a bug was submitted to him and he was fix in less than a few 10 minutes. Results Taco looked for several days, nothing, so, Taco help me to the letter to the world today, several important Daniel, ready to come to expert consultation. The consultation was a large and highly skilled physician, with a few people: DVIPDFMX developer Cho,luatex Developer Taco, plus XeTeX developer Jonathan Kew. Soon afterwards, the bell needed to be tied to the bell, and Cho found a possible problem. He unpacked the PDF file, carefully observed Cairo output the LuaTeX output in the font embedded part of the parameters, found that a number of STEMV, the difference. Using the editor to modify the unlocked PDF, adjust the STEMV to the same, two PDF files is almost immediately (although there are some differences, but this is one of the most important factors).