in the name of zero

[ pink profile ]
ok, i felt like updating my friendster profile waking up around 1:30 am from a second bad dream. thanks to some guy name michael and his edit friendster dot com thingy! the google add is soo badly placed though and it wrecks the decors. very stupid friendster design (and slow profile updates too. changes reflect only after a couple of hours/days)! i changed my name, and i also added a super cute new lynlyn picture that i absolutely adore!

[ chinese characters in gentoo! ]
yeah! well, i found this really cool site about liu yi fei, but it’s in chinese. the fonts were quite ugly at first (appeared as boxes) because i had no support for chinese fonts in my box. and since i’m such a big fan!, i decided i’d give the site some justice and view it with chinese character support. (although still quite pointless because i couldn’t even understand chinese, much less read chinese.) did i mention i’m trying to learn how to speak chinese? (at least the basics of what they use here. fukien i think. but i dont know) i figured it’ll just be like learning how to do assembly. only much harder. :p

i’ve never tried adding fonts other than the usual letters found in the english alphabet. so i tried shooting in the dark for starters:

steph@heaven ~ $ eix fonts | grep -i chinese
     Description:         Chinese TrueType Arphic Fonts
     Description:         Standard traditional Chinese fonts made by Minister of Education
(MOE), Republic of China.
     Description:         Kuo Chauo Chinese Fonts collection in BIG5 encoding

well well! portage has three chinese fonts available! i checked them out in detail and they are called:

arphicfonts - Chinese TrueType Arphic Fonts
twmoefonts - Standard traditional Chinese fonts made by Minister of Education (MOE), Republic of China
zh-kcfonts - Kuo Chauo Chinese Fonts collection in BIG5 encoding

emerged preview them but they’d cost a total of 30+ megabytes of download and that wont work for me since i’m doing dialup. so i settled for one. arphicfonts

heaven steph # emerge arphicfonts

the fonts were installed in /usr/share/fonts/arphicfonts and because they were true type, i have only to add the font path in xorg.conf as it has builtin support for truetype (so long as you have the correct modules loaded. Load “freetype”)

before and after screenshots of liuyifei dot org.

weeeeeeee! the after shot is much lovelier huh? i’m happily browsing the galleries now. i’ll only turn on the chinese font line in xorg if i view this site. at any other time, that line will be commented.