GB18030 support
From the ChangeLog in XFree86 repository, ticket 511 indicates:
- Encoding file updates (After X-TT Project):
- Removed jisx0208.1983-0.enc and added ‘ALIAS jisx0208.1983-0’ to
jisx0208.1990-0.enc. - Added Windows ucs2 cmap(3,1) to jisx0208.1990-0.enc and
jisx0201.1976-0.enc. - Added files for GB18030-0 and GB18030-1 (James Su).
Many efforts is ongoing to support the mandatory standard. I am happy to see these progresses, but unfortunatelly it seems that no font vendors are willing to release at least one of their fonts, and it seems unhopeful to see one in the future.
It’s a *shame* that there’s no freely-available GB18030 font, however. This meant that if you want GB18030 in your system, you have to pay for it. This is really really disappointing and much much more beyond the foolness of GB18030 itself! I’m not sure whether there’s a similar case in other countries, but you will see many countries to support vendors supporting THEIR languages and result in at least some free fonts, and rapid support of the charsets in most mainstream operating systems.
It’s not wrong to make money, but what will you say if you see if you have a mandatory national standatd confliciting with international standard, while they want you to pay for it?! I am not intending to object GB18030, but I really dislike it(by the way, who will really need a new standard when there’s de-facto international standard, and who will need these characters if there’s less than 1% population can really read them, if they did not take any mistake?), both technically and politically.