TTFs, Japanese and RedHat7.x

Introduction

These are a few notes about how I eventually got Unicode-oriented TrueType Fonts working in a Japanese environment in RedHat Linux 7.1 and 7.2.

The main reason I wanted to get the fonts working was to have them available in Tcl/Tk 8.3+, however other applications such as Netscape and Mozilla were also able to use them.

The fonts I wished to use were the Microsoft Arial (arialuni.ttf) which is installed on the Windows partition of my system, and the Bitstream Cyberbit font (cyberbit.ttf).

The Process

The new Japanese fonts should now be available to a heap of X applications which allow you to select fonts. Netscape 4.7x will see the Japanese portions of the arialuni and cyberbit fonts, but will not try and use them as Unicode fonts - you need Netscape 6, Mozilla, etc. for that.

In Tcl/Tk, you need to create a font, e.g.:

font create selfont -family "arial unicode ms" -size 24
and specify that in the Tk widget with -font selfont. The full set of fontnames available to Tcl/Tk can be seen by running Tcl's font families command.

Here is a sample of a Tk widget (my Tcl/Tk Japanese vocab drill system) using the MSArial font at 24 pts.

Jim Breen
April 2002


Jim Breen's Home Page and Japanese Page.