My earlier problem of character alignment has been resolved by only a click - I disabled Anti-aliasing and all the display problems in Kate and kwrite are resolved. Although Anti-aliasing seems to work on your system, for unknown reasons it doesn't work for me. Perhaps later on I will do more tests and see if there is anything I can come up with. The reason I asked if there are alternate Chinese fonts is that the Arphic fonts installed are very difficult even to identify the characters themselves at small font sizes (around 12). In Windows the default "mingti" font is quite readable at small font sizes, but this is not the case for Arphic. Both Chinese and Latin characters are not that easy to look at. I heard that KDE 3 has better support for i18n and non-Latin characters. Did anyone try the Alpha1 release?