Marc Waeckerlin
Even though my main Asian language is simplified Chinese (zh_CN), I sometimes also need Japanese (jp) and Korean (ko). Also, for reasons of beauty, I use traditional Chinese (zh_TW) in special (old stylish) documents (e.g. poems).
So, you mean I can get zh_CN to work properly, but then I have trouble using jp or zh_TW?
No, because the default font when you use zh_CN.UTF-8 is FZSongTi (package ttf-founder-simplified must be installed!)
Is there a workaround?
Use the FZSongTi font. This is a very comprehensive font which has not only the glyphs needed for simplified Chinese but also for traditional Chinese and Japanese. For Japanese you have to accept some compromises in style (have a look at the glyph for 直 in that font for example). But it will be readable.
I probably don't have a problem with Chinese, when I use a font in OpenOffice that exists in zh_CN and zh_TW, such as AR-Kaiti and AR-Songti, which exists as GB (zh_CN) and Big5 (zh_TW)?
The Arphic fonts are not as comprehensive as FZSongTi, I think you will be happier with FZSongTi. I'll "upgrade" the Arphic fonts soon to the improved versions by Arne Götje. He merged "AR PL SungtiL GB" and "AR PL Mingti2L Big5" into one font supporting both simplified and traditional Chinese ("AR PL ShanHeiSun Uni") and did the same for the Kaiti versions to create the new "AR PL ZenKai Uni". He plans to add more glyphs to make these fonts comprehensive enough to support Japanese as well.
What do Chinese people do, when they sometimes have to write letters in Japanese, e.g. if the work in the Chinese branch of Sony?
Use a font which has all needed glyphs? Readable, but you have to
decide whether you want a Chinese or Japanese style font.
Or rely on the fallbacks in GTK2 to automatically use different
fonts for missing glyphs (maybe ugly).
For extreme high quality like in printing you may need a markup system
(like HTML, Docbook, LaTeX, ... or even OpenOffice) where you can
specify which font should be used for which part of the text.
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Mike FABIAN