WenQuanYi (; aka: ''Spring of Letters'') is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

project of Chinese computer fonts licensed under GNU General Public License.

General

WenQuanYi project was started by Qianqian Fang (Screen name: FangQ; ), a Chinese

biomedical imaging Medical imaging is the technique and process of imaging the interior of a body for clinical analysis and medical intervention, as well as visual representation of the function of some organs or tissues (physiology). Medical imaging seeks to revea ...

researcher at the

Massachusetts General Hospital Massachusetts General Hospital (Mass General or MGH) is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School located in the West End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. It is the third oldest general hospital in the United Stat ...

, in October, 2004. The fonts of the WenQuanYi project are now included with the

Linux distribution A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...

s Ubuntu,

Fedora A fedora () is a hat with a soft brim and indented crown.Kilgour, Ruth Edwards (1958). ''A Pageant of Hats Ancient and Modern''. R. M. McBride Company. It is typically creased lengthwise down the crown and "pinched" near the front on both sides ...

, Slackware,

Magic Linux Magic or Magick most commonly refers to: * Magic (supernatural), beliefs and actions employed to influence supernatural beings and forces * Ceremonial magic, encompasses a wide variety of rituals of magic * Magical thinking, the belief that unrel ...

and CDLinux.

Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of D ...

, Gentoo, Mandriva, Arch Linux and Frugalware offer the sources for WenQuanYi fonts. The fonts are among the Chinese fonts officially supported by Wikimedia. WenQuanYi's website is using Habitat, a Wiki software 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 and outline fonts for all CJK characters. 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

glyph A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...

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/ Hangul characters are derived from UnDotum,

Bopomofo Bopomofo (), or Mandarin Phonetic Symbols, also named Zhuyin (), is a Chinese transliteration system for Mandarin Chinese and other related languages and dialects. More commonly used in Taiwanese Mandarin, it may also be used to transcribe ...

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 Droid is a font family first released in 2007 and created by Ascender Corporation for use by the Open Handset Alliance platform Android and licensed under the Apache License. The fonts are intended for use on the small screens of mobile hands ...

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 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

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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 GB 18030 Hanzi at 11-16px (9pt-12pt) font sizes.

Unibit

WenQuanYi Unibit (文泉驿Unibit) adopted the GNU Unifont'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 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.) 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