Windows – How to get proper Japanese font rendering using English Locale under Windows

I also like Windows fonts much better than the defaults on any Linux distributions. Well, at least the Windows XP default, Tahoma. (Also, I prefer no antialiasing at all for small font sizes, when using good TrueType fonts. Your mileage may vary!)

These days I find it very easy to get nice fonts in Ubuntu. (Gone are the days of needing to recompile Freetype with a certain option (I forget which) to get them right.)

Steps I took when last installing Ubuntu afresh

1. Put your TrueType fonts (.ttf files from Windows installation or e.g. the Microsoft Core Fonts package legally available on the web) in some directory, e.g. /usr/local/winfonts.

2. Edit /etc/fonts/local.config and add your winfont dir:

   <?xml version="1.0"?>
   <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
   <!-- /etc/fonts/fonts.conf file to configure system font access -->
   <fontconfig>
           <!-- Font directory list -->
           <dir>/usr/local/winfonts</dir> 
           <dir>/usr/share/X11/fonts/misc</dir>
   </fontconfig>
   

3. Run sudo fc-cache -fv to rebuild font information cache files. (Nowadays there's no need to create files like fonts.scale, fonts.dir or fonts.alias using ttmkfdir or other utilities!)

Then configure Tahoma 8 as the default font in your desktop environment (KDE's control centre for me; equally easy in the Gnome equivalent)

And that's it.

Alternative way

Another way is to simply install msttcorefonts package from Universe and run fc-cache, as instructed in this post on Ubuntu Blog.

The core fonts package doesn't include Tahoma though. But if you have it from other sources, copying the .ttf files to ~/.fonts/ (or /usr/local/share/fonts for system wide availability) before running fc-cache should be sufficient.

GDI is a core part of the Windows system. It's been improved steadily throughout Windows' lifecycle, but the only way to "replace" it is to replace Windows itself. As an additional note, as part of the Windows system libraries, Windows itself now takes great pains to ensure that you don't drop in a replacement DLL for it -- there are cached versions which Windows will use (and replace your modified one with) if it detects tampering.

(This is very much a feature. If you were able to easily replace system libraries, that would be a major security hole.)

Font rendering in particular went from horrendous (Windows 1 - 3.0) to decent (Windows 3.0 to XP) to really good (Windows Vista and 7) as GDI evolved.

I don't think you'll find anything that really helps you out here. However, without replacing your entire graphics subsystem (which is essentially impossible), you can tweak ClearType to get you the best possible font rendering using the ClearType tuner from Microsoft.

Update

Per alex's comment on Andrew Moore's response, I have to admit that I misread the original post as well, and didn't see the second + there. I read it as GDI+, not GDI++, and apologize for that.

Based on what I'm reading of GDI++ (this is my first foray into it), I still recommend not going that route, and I continue to recommend the ClearType tuner. The reason remains the same, based on how I'm reading GDI++ worked, it seemed like a pretty risky proposition -- it worked exactly as I described above, where I mentioned ripping out and replacing a core piece of system functionality. While there may be no real downstream bad effects, you have to understand that implementing GDI and GDI+ while enhancing them means that you also need to implement every bug Microsoft kept around for backward compatibility -- no mean feat.

I'm keeping the answer around, because it seems the general community agrees with my assessment of the overall situation, even with the misreading of the original post.