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
langparameter of the website. You can’t change this easily.
Well, in Firefox’s settings there’s an option to use my own fonts instead of the web site, so I don’t think it’s related to anything like that, but rather some setting within the OS, related to locale config files.
Most cases will be solved with these settings (but some applications may need additional tweeks):
- Use
ja_JP.UTF-8locale, or - Use
~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf
I was trying to do that but I’m unsure what to edit to do that, since most tutorials are using either a Debian based or Arch distro.
I was using a similar guide, and it also talked about the locale.gen, but that file was never to be found, I just searched a bit more into that and this popped up. So it seems Fedora handles things differently, but now I’m unsure what commands to execute since I’m not sure the ones in that thread are also valid for me.
You can use
localectlto change the locale on Fedora. Here’s what you need to do:- See if you have Japanese locale installed. Something like
ja_JP.UTF-8should be in the output oflocalectl list-locales. - If it’s not, you should install it using the following command:
sudo dnf install langpacks-ja(I’m not 100 % sure about this and I don’t have a Fedora system to test it on.) - Set the locale:
sudo localectl set-locale LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8 - Reboot your system. Everything should be in Japanese now.
This will (probably) change everything to Japanese – texts in menus, error messages in the terminal, and also the font rendering. This answer on Stack Overflow suggests to do something with your
fonts.conf. This way your UI would be in English (or your preferred language) and kanji would render as the Japanese variants.- See if you have Japanese locale installed. Something like
- Use
There’s a guide here to show Japanese fonts by default and also how to configure your browser to show Japanese fonts by default.
I was using a similar guide, and it also talked about the locale.gen, but that file was never to be found, I just searched a bit more into that and this popped up. So it seems Fedora handles things differently, but now I’m unsure what commands to execute since I’m not sure the ones in that thread are also valid for me.
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.
you can you this as a reference https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Localization/Simplified_Chinese#Chinese_characters_displayed_as_variant_(Japanese)_glyphs . although it is for chinese, but you can take the font config of it and reorder it (put
Noto Sans CJK JPat first)
