WenQuanYi


WenQuanYi is an open-source project of Chinese computer fonts licensed under GNU General Public License.

General

WenQuanYi project was started by Qianqian Fang, a Chinese biomedical imaging researcher at the Massachusetts General Hospital, in October, 2004.
The fonts of the WenQuanYi project are now included with the Linux distributions Ubuntu, Fedora, Slackware, Magic Linux and CDLinux. Debian, Gentoo, Mandriva, ArchLinux and Frugalware offer the sources for WenQuanYi fonts. The fonts are among the Chinese fonts officially supported by Wikimedia.
WenQuanYi's website is using Habitat, a Wiki software derived from UseModWiki by Qianqian Fang. It is allowed to create or modify the glyphs online.

Fonts

WenQuanYi project aims to create high-quality open-source bitmap and outline fonts for all CJK characters. It includes Zen Hei, Micro Hei, Bitmap Song and Unibit font. As of version 0.8.38, the WenQuanYi Zen Hei font covers more than 35,000 glyphs.
Font familyInitial releaseLatest stable releaseSerif?Bitmap?Monospace?LicenseCharsGlyphsFormatPageSample
Zen HeiSansNoNoGPL 2TTC
Zen Hei MonoSansNoYesGPL 2TTC
Zen Hei SharpSansNoNoGPL 2TTC
Micro HeiSansNoNoApache 2 / GPL 3TTC
Micro Hei MonoSansNoYesApache 2 / GPL 3TTC
Bitmap SongSerif Yes NoGPL 2Multi-strike Bitmap Font
UnibitSansYesYesGPL 2Multi-strike Bitmap Font

Zen Hei

WenQuanYi Zen Hei, WenQuanYi Zen Hei Mono and WenQuanYi Zen Hei Sharp co-exist in a single TTC file. They are also with embedded bitmaps. The Latin/Hangul characters are derived from UnDotum, Bopomofo are from cwTeX, mono-spaced Latin are from M+ M2 Light. These fonts have full CJK coverage. The font package is included with Fedora and Ubuntu.

Micro Hei

WenQuanYi Micro Hei, WenQuanYi Micro Hei Mono are derived from the Droid Sans font and readable in compact sizes. The primitive motivation of this project was to extend Droid Sans Fallback's glyph coverage. Since the GB 18030 compatible Droid Sans Fallback font's release, the Micro Hei project has been de facto inactive.

Bitmap Song

WenQuanYi Bitmap Song has full coverage to GB 18030 Hanzi at 11-16px font sizes.

Unibit

WenQuanYi Unibit adopted the GNU Unifont's scheme of 8x16 and 16x16 glyphs. Then the contributors added 10,000 more glyphs. The improvements done by WenQuanYi Unibit has been merged back to GNU Unifont.

Glyph

The glyph of traditional characters included in WenQuanYi is the new character form of the Mainland China. The glyph comes from G-Source of Unicode and the standard of a character list from the 1988 List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese and the 2009 List of General Standardized Chinese.
The glyph is not from T-Source and H-Source. It does not conform with the standardized traditional character writing behavior of writers from Taiwan and Hong Kong. In other words, it does not support the traditional Chinese character set.
Some examples of characters with different glyph are: 別, 吳, 骨, 角, 過, 這, 草, 放, etc.