WenQuanYi (; aka: ''Spring of Letters'') is an open-source project of Chinese

computer font A computer font is implemented as a digital data file containing a set of graphically related glyphs. A computer font is designed and created using a font editor. A computer font specifically designed for the computer screen, and not for print ...

s licensed under

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...

General

WenQuanYi project was started by Qianqian Fang (Screen name: FangQ; ), a Chinese biomedical imaging researcher at the Massachusetts General Hospital, in October, 2004. The fonts of the WenQuanYi project are now included with the Linux distributions

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All ...

, Fedora,

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, Magic Linux and CDLinux. Debian, Gentoo,

Mandriva Mandriva S.A. was a public software company specializing in Linux and open-source software. Its corporate headquarters was in Paris, and it had development centers in Metz, France and Curitiba, Brazil. Mandriva, S.A. was the developer and maint ...

Arch Linux Arch Linux () is an independently developed, x86-64 general-purpose Linux distribution that strives to provide the latest stable versions of most software by following a rolling-release model. The default installation is a minimal base system, ...

and

Frugalware Frugalware Linux has been a general-purpose Linux distribution designed for intermediate users who are familiar with command-line operations. Early versions were based on Slackware, but it later became an independently developed distribution. Frug ...

offer the sources for WenQuanYi fonts. The fonts are among the Chinese fonts officially supported by

Wikimedia The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...

. WenQuanYi's website is using

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, a

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derived from

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by Qianqian Fang. It is allowed to create or modify the glyphs online.

Fonts

WenQuanYi project aims to create high-quality open-source

bitmap In computing, a bitmap is a mapping from some domain (for example, a range of integers) to bits. It is also called a bit array or bitmap index. As a noun, the term "bitmap" is very often used to refer to a particular bitmapping application: t ...

and

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fonts for all

CJK characters In internationalization, CJK characters is a collective term for the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages, all of which include Chinese characters and derivatives in their writing systems, sometimes paired with other scripts. Collectively, th ...

. It includes Zen Hei (Regular, Mono and Sharp), Micro Hei (Regular and Mono), Bitmap Song and Unibit font. As of version 0.8.38, the WenQuanYi Zen Hei font covers more than 35,000 glyphs.

Zen Hei

WenQuanYi Zen Hei (文泉驿正黑), WenQuanYi Zen Hei Mono (文泉驿等宽正黑) and WenQuanYi Zen Hei Sharp (文泉驿点阵正黑) co-exist in a single TTC file. They are also with embedded bitmaps. The

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

Hangul The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul, . Hangul may also be written as following South Korea's standard Romanization. ( ) in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, is the modern official writing system for the Korean language. The le ...

characters are derived from UnDotum, Bopomofo are from cwTeX, mono-spaced Latin are from M+ M2 Light. These fonts have full CJK coverage. The font package is included with Fedora and Ubuntu.

Micro Hei

WenQuanYi Micro Hei (文泉驿微米黑), WenQuanYi Micro Hei Mono (文泉驿等宽微米黑) are derived from the Droid Sans font (merged with Droid Sans Fallback) and readable in compact sizes. The primitive motivation of this project was to extend Droid Sans Fallback's glyph coverage. Since the

GB 18030 GB 18030 is a Chinese government standard, described as ''Information Technology — Chinese coded character set'' and defines the required language and character support necessary for software in China. GB18030 is the registered Internet n ...

compatible Droid Sans Fallback font's release, the Micro Hei project has been de facto inactive. Unlike Zen Hei, which is drawn stroke-by-stroke, Micro Hei and its predecessor Droid Sans are created by combining radical components using TrueType references. The main goal is a reduced file size, hence "Micro".

Bitmap Song

WenQuanYi Bitmap Song (文泉驿点阵宋体) has full coverage to

Hanzi at 11-16px (9pt-12pt) font sizes.

Unibit

WenQuanYi Unibit (文泉驿Unibit) adopted the

GNU Unifont GNU Unifont is a free Unicode bitmap font using an intermediate bitmapped font format created by Roman Czyborra. The main Unifont covers all of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). The "upper" companion covers significant parts of the Supplementa ...

's scheme of 8x16 and 16x16 glyphs. Then the contributors added 10,000 more glyphs. The improvements done by WenQuanYi Unibit has been merged back to GNU Unifont.

Glyph

The glyph of traditional characters included in WenQuanYi is the new character form of the Mainland China. The glyph comes from G-Source (character source from Mainland China) of Unicode and the standard of a character list from the 1988

List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese The ''List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese'' () is a list of 7,000 commonly used Chinese characters in Chinese. It was created in 1988 in the People's Republic of China. The ''List of Frequently Used Characters in Modern Chinese'' ...

and the 2009 List of General Standardized Chinese (通用规范汉字表). The glyph is not from T-Source (character source from Taiwan) and H-Source (character source from Hong Kong). It does not conform with the standardized traditional character writing behavior of writers from Taiwan and Hong Kong. In other words, it does not support the traditional Chinese character set. (For more information, see

Han unification Han unification is an effort by the authors of Unicode and the Universal Character Set to map multiple character sets of the Han characters of the so-called CJK languages into a single set of unified characters. Han characters are a featur ...

.) Some examples of characters with different glyph are: 別, 吳, 骨, 角, 過, 這, 草, 放, etc.

Notes

References

External links

* * (Official site in English) * {{Free and open-source typography CJK typefaces Free software Unicode typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 2004