What is a ttf font I can freely use that covers Chinese, Japanese and Korean for Java

Question

On a blackbox linux system neither the system or the openjdk had any fonts so this caused issue for my Java application.

So far to get round this I have copied the Lucida fonts from an Oracle Java install into the jre/lib/fonts dir and ran fc-cache -rv jre/lib/fonts and that has worked for me.

But it seems these standard fonts do not support CKJ scripts, what is a font I can copy to fonts that will add support for these scripts for my Java application.

Note I cannot run install or similar on the linux machine I need a font I can just bundle with my application that I can then copy to the jre/lib/fonts folder.

Solution 1

You could take a look at Noto, which will "support all languages with a harmonious look and feel."

Solution 2

DO NOT combine and create your own CJK fonts, because same Chinese Character (a codepoint in Unicode) may have different glyphs in Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Japanese and Korean fonts. If you use font designed for one area for users from another area, they will feel that your font is strange, hard to recognize, or even wrong.

Check Noto Serif CJK is here! for an example about glyphs of 述.

Check Source Han Serif, an open source Pan-CJK typeface for an example about glyphs of 曜.

I strongly recommend you to use Noto Sans CJK and Noto Serif CJK family for your purpose, and use Noto Sans/Serif CJK SC when rendering Chinese Simplified text, Noto Sans/Serif CJK TC when rendering Chinese Traditional text, Noto Sans/Serif CJK JP when rendering Japanese text, and Noto Sans/Serif CJK KR when rendering Korean text. Never mix them together.

Solution 3

I couldn't find a font that supported Chinese, Japanese and Korean so, I had to create my own. Below is a quick program I made to show off this font showing hello in all four languages + English. (I hope that's ok).

Download Link: https://mega.nz/#!Mt5mCJzR!DMVa1usSTV6OEraQQlcF8dGcg5VYkboNB6O_dkQD-QE

Edit:

I found someone else who has done a similar thing to me (combined lots of fonts) The link to their download is here.

Comments

[Paul Taylor]

How it is not about programming iM asking what font can I install to provide full Javafunctionality with Open Jdk

[paul23]

The whole idea of unicode is that each codepoint corresponds to a single character. - This in contrast to the windows codepages.

[Jongware]

@paul23: but in deciding that, the Unicode consortium did not take localized preferences into account. For example, it took years of lobbying to finally get different Unicode values for ţ and ț – initially the Unicode experts had decided it was "just a graphic difference".

[amitava mozumder]

notocjk only does asian languages, but what if I want to support all languages? how do i go about doing that?

[ChenZheChina]

@amitavamozumder Noto is a huge font family with many languages covered. And, they also have different fonts to cover glyph variants like Noto CJK fonts cover glyph variants between China, Japan and Korea. For example, Noto has Arabic and Urdu fonts respectively. Though they both share same Unicode codepoints, they have extremely different looks. So I’d say that the best way to support “all” languages is to use multiple fonts, and use them correctly when some different characters share a same codepoint.