Comment 132 for bug 502610

Jeff Bai <email address hidden> and I are currently working on a newer ordering of this file for the CJK part at https://github.com/AOSC-Dev/aosc-os-abbs/issues/201. Hopefully we will come up with a modernized version this weekend or so.

We are mainly focused on these points:

* Separate sans (hei), serif (ming/song) and cursive (kai). Like the current git version of the file, we are now only adding strongly monospace (i.e. monospace for non-han parts too) fonts as monospace, but this is actually worth a discussion IFF the font is only going to provide CJK chars. (We know at least FW kanas and hanzi/kanjis are always 1em wide (good), while some hanguls are like .93 em (oops).)
* Font weight matching. Many old CJK serifs (e.g. UMing, SimSun) look too thin to match common serifs, but the TeX community have good fonts to remedy this -- cwTeX and Fandol fonts. We add [kind of prepend, in CJK ranges] these fonts to the list accordingly. As a bonus, these are all FOSS. Some CJK sans on the other hand is too heavy (e.g. SimHei[1]), but now we have Noto Sans CJK/Source Han Sans to remedy this.
* Sans-serif monospace is better than serif monospace, at least for computer screens. Additionally, monospace CJK serifs are often old and have the very-thin-weight issue.

Note that we are not supposed to nor intending to fix any of these "locale mix" problems like what was shown in the description of attachment 24321. Locale matching problems should be done via in-browser detection schemes like html lang tags, with appropriate locale-aware requests to fc, which hopefully will be handled by other distro-specific config wiles. We are only trying to make sure the styles of CJK part matches latin fonts matched for the generic family names, as well as themselves. (This is actually a terrible problem on MS Windows, where they consider SimSun a sans-serif.)

(Well, considering the widths of some glyphs like 复 in Japanese fonts (they are often not actually using the glyphs in the language but using it as some glyph to be referenced by other glyphs), I will go with TW, KR or CN fonts as the preferred source of Chinese glyphs. Choosing the traditional locales is just for "going back the roots and be acceptable to as many locales as possible". (KR glyphs are kind of old/kangxi-ish-style -- lack of use lead to lack of evolution.))

[1]: In Chinese, Hei (黑) stands for black. This actually caused some confusion and resulted in many people calling bold weights "Hei".

I have no idea on how to fix the bad "ja" language tags in Chinese fonts though. (why are they trying to <s>eat</s> manage everything?)