Why can't my Chromium display Japanese characters?

Question

I use Chromium, but it can't display Japanese characters, as you can see in the picture.

Left is firefox, as you can see, it displayes the characters correctly. Chromium is on the right.

This is Fedora 13, with all browsers and fonts installed from Repositories.

Solution 1

There is a known problem - Issue 7160: Wrong font for Japanese characters in English language Chrome, dating from January 2008 but unfixed until today.

Only workarounds contributed by users are available, none of which is perfect and some contradict each other. It seems that the only real solution at the moment is to keep on using Firefox.

Workaround 1 : Issue 7160: Wrong font for Japanese characters in English language Chrome

In the font and language settings, set Serif Font to MS PMincho; Sans-Serif Font to Meiryo; Fixed-Width Font to MS Gothic.

This yields the correct glyphs for all Japanese sites. English looks as usual in Sans-Serif (most of the Web), but a bit harder to read in Fixed-Width and Serif.

Workaround 2 : Chromium and font

Since I'm in Japan (but I would rather use English), google defaults to the japanese site. On this, all the text becomes squares. However, I installed Droid font from AUR. It comes with Japanese font, and that fixed it. Now when I go to google, I can actually read the Japanese webpage

Workaround 3 : How to display Japanese characters in Google Chrome/Chromium?

remove google-droid fonts:

yum remove google-droid*

Solution 2

For Japanese characters:

sudo apt-get install ttf-sazanami-mincho ttf-sazanami-gothic

For Chinese characters:

sudo apt-get install ttf-arphic-uming ttf-arphic-zenhei

or

sudo apt-get install ttf-arphic-uming ttf-arphic-ukai

For Korean characters:

sudo apt-get install ttf-unfonts-core

Solution 3

For 2021 and later on Debian:

sudo apt update
sudo apt search mincho

There should be many Japanese fonts now. I recommend the Takao pack, but please choose a package from those available at the time you read this.

sudo apt install fonts-takao

You do not need to log out and back in again, but you must completely close and reopen Chrome for the fonts to be picked up.

Comments

[Amir Kotb]

Yeah, well, ok, but Fedora is RPM based. No apt-get just like that, etc...

[hoju]

r/apt-get /rpm --/