I just installed Fedora and I’m trying to figure out how to make it display Japanese fonts, by default it displays kanji as Chinese characters, I installed some fonts but still no change, how do I change this?
A. I don’t know much about CJK fonts. I’m just spitballing. I am also half asleep.
B. It depends where the font is displayed. As you probably know, different Japanese, Korean and Chinese characters, which share history and look similar, share one unicode codepoint, see this Wikipedia article. Which specific glyph is shown is decided by some variable that specifies in what language the text is written:
- If the text is somewhere in the GUI (the title bar, the panel, some menu), it is probably decided by your default language and locale. This can be changed somewhere in settings. Changing this would also probably change everything to Japanese.
- If the text is somewhere on the web, this is decided by the
lang
parameter of the website. You can’t change this easily.
Most cases will be solved with these settings (but some applications may need additional tweeks):
- Use
ja_JP.UTF-8
locale, or - Use
~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf
- Use
If japanese kanji show as their Chinese variant make sure you are using the proper font variant. My recommendation is
noto-sans-cjk-jp
.Fedora does allow you to set the locale, it doesn’t mention generating them so they might very well already be present You can use https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/latest/system-administrators-guide/basic-system-configuration/System_Locale_and_Keyboard_Configuration/ to read more than I can tell you here.
“By default it displays kanji as Chinese characters” Not quite sure what you mean by that
Edit: my bad, I read the other comment’s link and had not encountered the issue yet. Wish you luck to solve thisI think it’s pure luck what font does your OS prefer, I was using Pop_OS and it defaulted to Japanese, but I think it’s more common to default to Chinese because of the population size.
I think it defaults to Japanese every time in my experience
Not this time it seems.