Some kanji characters in i18n font are unreadable for Japanese users #34396

%%%--- Operating System, Graphics card ---

Ubuntu 12.10
GeForce GTX670

- Blender version with error, and version that worked ---

r54806

- Short description of error ---

Most Japanese kanji characters and Chinese hanzi characters have same shapes, but there are some exceptions that their shapes are quite different between Japan and China, and Droid Sans Fallback font has the Chinese-style ones. (Instead, Droid Sans Japanese font has the Japanese-style ones.)

For example, Japanese users cannot read "置", "誤" and so on in this font at all. See attached pictures:

置 i18n_font_J-C_difference1.png
誤 i18n_font_J-C_difference2.png

Furthermore, many characters have slightly different shapes from Japanese-style, and Japanese Hiragana and Katakana characters in Droid fonts are very bad in quality like children's poor handwriting. Those things often irritate me.

I think Blender should include multiple i18n fonts or use system wide font, and select suitable one according to language setting or system locale.
%%%

Changed status to: 'Open'

%%%Hi,

Obviously we can only work on such features with developers who can verify that it all works properly.
Maybe Tamito can add this on todo, now we work on Freestyle anyway?%%%

%%%Recently I submitted patch that allows text editor and Python console to handle CJK characters properly using international monospace font:

http://projects.blender.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=34373&group_id=9&atid=127

This patch, however, obviously increases file sizes of Blender's release archives about 3-4 MB. If Blender furthermore has multiple i18n fonts for each locale, in the release archive the font files occupy about 10 MB at least. So, I recommend that Blender has no i18n font file and uses system-wide ones if necessary. Debian's official package is indeed using system-wide Droid font with fontconfig library.

My suggestion:

Remove international font file (release/datafiles/fonts/droidsans.ttf.gz)
Introduce font substitution system that uses system-wide font if a character is not found in the standard font
Instead, remove "International Font" setting from user preference
%%%

%%%This problem report is not considered as a bug of Blender.
The problem description refers to a general issue of Unicode due to the fact that one code point of Unicode represents two or more resemble glyphs in different Asian languages.
There is no code in Blender that is malfunctioning. If a proper Japanese font can be used, the reported problem will be resolved.
For this reason, I think it is more appropriate to file this as a feature request rather than a bug report.
As suggested by Irie-san, a way to address this issue is to implement a font selection mechanism that allows users to specify a UI font instead of the built-in international font.
This solution should be pretty easy to implement, as Blender already has a font selection mechanism for text objects.
More comprehensive solutions are also possible, and any development direction in this regard is a matter of future discussion.%%%

Changed status from 'Open' to: 'Archived'

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Some kanji characters in i18n font are unreadable for Japanese users #34396