$Id: WenQuanYi-Bitmap 0.6 Rev. 0 2005/8/8 20:59:00 qianqianfang Exp$

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               Wen Quan Yi Bitmap Song 

                    Release Notes

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Dedication: 

      To WANG Hong, for her extrodinary contribution to 
      the Wen Quan Yi Project

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Summary:

    Author   : The WenQuanYi Project Contributors
    Webpage  : http://wqy.sourceforge.net/en/
    Font Name: WenQuanYi Bitmap Song
    Version  : 0.6 (White Dragon)
    Release  : 2
    Copyright:  2004,2005, The WenQuanYi Project Board of Trustees
    License  : GPL
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          May the Font be with you, forever!

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Legal Disclaimer:

Permission is granted to copy, distribute, and/or modify 
this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation 
License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by 
the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, 
no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy 
of the license is available at 
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html.

This document may be copied and distributed in any medium, 
either commercially or noncommercially, provided that the 
GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), the copyright notices, 
and the license notice saying the GNU FDL applies to the 
document are reproduced in all copies, and that you add 
no other conditions whatsoever to those of the GNU FDL. 

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Table of Content

 I.   Introduction
 II.  Installation Guide
 III. About "The WenQuanYi Project"
 IV.  Links to Open-source CJK font resources

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 I. Introduction

The bitmap font in this package includes complete CJK Unified 
Ideographics (U4E00~U9FA5) glyphs at four different sizes 
(9pt-12X12 pixel, 10pt-13X13 pixel, 11pt-15X15 pixel,
and 12pt-16X16pt) and two weights (medium and bold). 
This font can be used for displaying Chinese on most 
GNU Linux/Unix based computer systems. Using bitmap 
Chinese font can overcome the blurring problem for 
many True-Type Chinese font due to anti-aliasing and 
insufficiency in hinting methods for Chinese characters. 
For 12pt font, Hangul glyphs (U+AC00~U+D7A3) from GNU Unifont 
(Roman Czyborra/David Starner et al.) were used for bold
face while those from Hanterm 3.x <http://elf.kaist.ac.kr/hanterm> 
were used for medium face. 

This font is built upon the previous works by firefly
(firefly@firefly.idv.tw)[2] and Redflag Linux Inc[3]. We 
would like to give our sincere thanks to their 
ground-breaking contributions for the Chinese 
open-source community.

The development of this font involved thousands of people
for about 10 months' endeavor [1]. More than fifteen thousands
of new bitmap glyphs were painted and more than thirty five
thousands of existing glyphs were improved upon or redrawn 
(for detailed statistics, please refer to STAT.txt).

We release this font to the public as an open-source software 
in terms of GPL. You are free to copy, distribute, and/or 
modify this font as long as the license permits.

We hope you find this font useful. Meanwhile, we are 
currently working on the bitmap fonts for CJK Unified 
Ideographics Extension A (U3400~U4DB5), we sincerely invite
you to join us by contributing to our project. 
Please visit our webpage for details on how to contribute.

  http://wqy.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/eindex.cgi?HowToContribute

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 II. Installation Guide

    Please refer to INSTALL for details.

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 III. About The WenQuanYi Project

The WenQuanYi Project was created by Qianqian Fang[8] in 
Oct 2004. The overall goal of this project is to enrich 
open-source Chinese software and resources and facilitate the 
communications between computer users using Chinese characters 
(Chinese, Japanese and Korean). One important mile-stone for 
the project is to create the bitmap character glyphs and 
outline fonts for all 70,000+ Chinese characters currently 
encoded by Unicode Consortium.

There are two major ongoing sub-projects which are the Bitmap 

Chinese project and Vector Chinese project, respectively. 
The former subproject targets at portability and screen 
optimization. 

One of the major complains coming from the Linux Chinese users
is the blurring of Chinese True-Type font when displayed on
the screen. This is due to the insufficiency in hinting of the
font due to the complex structure of glyph. Moreover, for 
pattern reasons, FreeType rendering engine can not use hinting 
table within the pre-hinted True-type font. One solution for 
better screen quality is to embed pre-optimized bitmap glyphs
into the True-Type font or used externally. This font is built
in light of this purpose.

The WenQuanYi Project use Wiki[1] as the major tool for 
coordinating the development of the font, documentation
creation and organization. It is greatly benefited from the
large-scale/distributed/parallel cooperative development 
mechanism provided by Wiki engine. About 1/5 of the 
font editing (more than 7,000) was done online with
the JavaScript tools in each character Wiki page.

There project consists of a "Steering Committee" by the
core members, and a "Team B" for bitmap Chinese font 
development, a "Team V" for outline font development.
Meanwhile, a large number of anonymous contributors also
participate our development through the Wiki.

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 IV. Links to Open-source CJK font resources


[1] The WenQuanYi Project Homepage
      http://wqy.sourceforge.net/            (Chinese version)
      http://wqy.sourceforge.net/en/         (English version)
      http://sourceforge.net/projects/wqy/   (Sourceforge project)

[2] Firefly bitmap font
      http://www.study-area.org/apt/firefly-font/

[3] Redflag Linux Co.
     http://www.redflag-linux.com/

[4] Arphic Public License
     http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/non-gnu/chinese-fonts-truetype/LICENSE

[5] Unifonts Project
     http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fCJKUnifonts

[6] Open Source Hong Kong Fonts Project
     http://freefonts.oaka.org/en/index.php/Main_Page

[7] The Unicode Consortium
     http://www.unicode.org/

[8] Qianqian Fang homepage
     http://nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/~fangq/

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$Id: WenQuanYi-Bitmap 0.6 Rev. 0 2005/8/8 20:59:00 qianqianfang Exp$
