[tlug] Browser/Font Question

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Jim Breen writes:

 > I thought I'd ask here, because there are some clued-up people on
 > the list who will understand my question, and maybe have an answer.
 > 
 > First, what do you see here: 直?

I see a tilde. ;-)  XEmacs tells me it's a Big5 character, though. :-)

 > On my Ubuntu system (via WWWJDIC) Firefox and Chrome show the
 > Chinese version,

What happens if you start them in a Japanese locale (eg,
"LC_ALL=ja_JP.UTF8 firefox")?

 > No fiddling with font settings changes the behaviour.

What do you mean by "no fiddling with font settings"?  Font settings
in the apps, or (on Linux) fonts.conf (this might be in
/etc/fonts/fonts.conf or elsewhere depending on distro, and can be
changed per user in ~/.fonts.conf)?

The default settings in /etc/fonts.conf (1) tend to prefer Chinese
fonts, and (2) tend to alias[1] all the Han fonts to each other.  You
might try specifying a "monospace" font on Linux; at least on my
Gentoo system all of the Japanese monospace fonts come before the
Chinese monospace fonts in the <prefer> stanza.

 > Does anyone have a suggestion on how to make the Japanese appear
 > more often?

What do you mean by make Japanese appear more often?  On J. Random
User's screen?  Mostly likely, you can't help this.

 > Why FF can get it right in Windows and wrong in Linux?

I would guess it's because the systems configure their default fonts
differently, and implement font selection procedures differently.

Footnotes: 
[1]  I forget how this actually works, probably it's just that all of
the Han fonts say they can handle all of the Han languages.  Which is
sorta true, but only sorta :-(