Chinese characters support in Iceweasel-Firefox and in the console terminal

By xngo on May 1, 2019

Install locale

apt-get update 
apt-get install locales 
dpkg-reconfigure locales
# Select en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8.
# Set default locale to en_US.UTF-8.

Install your desired fonts(e.g. Chinese)

# Install Chinese fonts so that it display correctly in Iceweseal/Firefox and in the console.
apt-get install fonts-hanazono
 
#apt-get install fonts-arphic-ukai fonts-arphic-uming

fonts-arphic-ukai(8,093.2 kB) and fonts-arphic-uming(7,637.6 kB) packages will only support traditional and simplified Chinese characters but doesn't support CJK Extension. On the other hand, fonts-hanazono(16,555.0 kB) supports traditional, simplified Chinese and CJK Extension. Test Chinese characters at http://ctext.org/font-test-page.

Reboot

Reboot so that changes will take effect, especially for the console terminal.

Bonus

  1. To keep your locale small, apt-get install localepurge.
  2. Edit /etc/locale.nopurge to keep the locale you like to preserve. For example, I want to preserve all Chinese locales. Therefore, I will add the followings:
en 
en_US.UTF-8
zh
zh_CN
zh_CN.UTF-8
zh_TW
zh_TW.UTF-8

References

  • http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=829186#829186
  • http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/39542/how-to-make-chinese-characters-display-properly-on-chromium
  • https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/fonts/
  • https://fruit.je/utf-8
  • http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/14027/what-fonts-are-good-for-unicode-glyphs
  • https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=unifont
  • http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
  • http://git.wikimedia.org/blob/mediawiki%2Fcore.git/HEAD/languages%2FNames.php

About the author

Xuan Ngo is the founder of OpenWritings.net. He currently lives in Montreal, Canada. He loves to write about programming and open source subjects.