WenQuanYi is an open-source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 project of Chinese computer font

Computer font

A computer font is an electronic data file containing a set of glyphs, characters, or symbols such as dingbats. Although the term font first referred to a set of metal type sorts in one style and size, since the 1990s it is generally used to refer to a scalable set of digital shapes that may be...

s licensed under GNU General Public License

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

.

General

WenQuanYi project was started by Qianqian Fang (Screen name: FangQ; ), a Chinese biomedical imaging

Medical imaging

Medical imaging is the technique and process used to create images of the human body for clinical purposes or medical science...

 researcher at the Massachusetts General Hospital

Massachusetts General Hospital

Massachusetts General Hospital is a teaching hospital and biomedical research facility in the West End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts...

, in October, 2004.

Now the fonts of WenQuanYi project are included with of Ubuntu

Ubuntu (operating system)

Ubuntu is a computer operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software. It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu...

, Fedora, Slackware

Slackware

Slackware is a free and open source Linux-based operating system. It was one of the earliest operating systems to be built on top of the Linux kernel and is the oldest currently being maintained. Slackware was created by Patrick Volkerding of Slackware Linux, Inc. in 1993...

, Magic Linux and CDLinux. Debian

Debian

Debian is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open source software primarily under the GNU General Public License along with other free software licenses. Debian GNU/Linux, which includes the GNU OS tools and Linux kernel, is a popular and influential...

, Gentoo

Gentoo Linux

Gentoo Linux is a computer operating system built on top of the Linux kernel and based on the Portage package management system. It is distributed as free and open source software. Unlike a conventional software distribution, the user compiles the source code locally according to their chosen...

, Mandriva

Mandriva

Mandriva S.A. is a publicly traded Linux and open source software company with its headquarters in Paris, France and development center in Curitiba, Brazil. Mandriva, S.A...

, ArchLinux and Frugalware

Frugalware

Frugalware Linux is a general-purpose Linux distribution designed for intermediate users who are familiar with command-line operations. Early versions were based on Slackware, but it is now an independently-developed distribution...

 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

Wiki

A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...

 software

Wiki software

Wiki software is collaborative software that runs a wiki, i.e., a website that allows users to create and collaboratively edit web pages via a web browser. A wiki system is usually a web application that runs on one or more web servers...

 derived from UseModWiki

UseModWiki

UseModWiki is a wiki engine written in the Perl programming language. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License. Pages in UseModWiki are stored in ordinary files, not in a relational database. Something similar to the interface can be seen in MediaWiki with the classic skin.- History...

 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 (Regular, Mono and Sharp), Micro Hei (Regular and Mono), Bitmap Song and Unibit font. As of version 0.8.38, the WenQuanYi Zen Hei font covers more than 35,000 glyph

Glyph

A glyph is an element of writing: an individual mark on a written medium that contributes to the meaning of what is written. A glyph is made up of one or more graphemes....

s.

Font family	Initial release	Latest stable release	Serif?	Bitmap?	Monospace?	License	Chars	Glyphs	Format	Page	Sample
Zen Hei			Sans	No	No	GPL GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....  2			TTC TrueType TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript...	http://wenq.org/enindex.cgi?ZenHei%28en%29
Zen Hei Mono				No	Yes
Zen Hei Sharp				No	No						Using Bitmap Song for 11-16px; using Zen Hei for other font size.
Micro Hei			Sans	No	No	Apache Apache License The Apache License is a copyfree free software license authored by the Apache Software Foundation . The Apache License requires preservation of the copyright notice and disclaimer....  2 / GPL 3			TTC	http://wenq.org/enindex.cgi?MicroHei%28en%29
Micro Hei Mono				No	Yes
Bitmap Song			Serif (Ming)	Yes (only 11-16px)	No	GPL 2			Multi-strike Bitmap Font	http://wenq.org/enindex.cgi?BitmapSong_en
Unibit			Sans	Yes	Yes	GPL 2			Multi-strike Bitmap Font	http://wenq.org/enindex.cgi?Unibit

Zen Hei

WenQuanYi Zen Hei (文泉驿正黑), WenQuanYi Zen Hei Mono (文泉驿等宽正黑) and WenQuanYi Zen Hei Sharp (文泉驿点阵正黑) co-exist in a single TTC file. They are also with embedded bitmaps. The Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

/Hangul

Hangul

Hangul,Pronounced or ; Korean: 한글 Hangeul/Han'gŭl or 조선글 Chosŏn'gŭl/Joseongeul the Korean alphabet, is the native alphabet of the Korean language. It is a separate script from Hanja, the logographic Chinese characters which are also sometimes used to write Korean...

 characters are derived from UnDotum, Bopomofo

Bopomofo

Zhuyin fuhao , often abbreviated as zhuyin and colloquially called bopomofo, was introduced in the 1910s as the first official phonetic system for transcribing Chinese, especially Mandarin....

 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 (文泉驿微米黑), WenQuanYi Micro Hei Mono (文泉驿等宽微米黑) are derived from the Droid Sans

Droid (font)

Droid is a font family created by Ascender Corporation for use by the Open Handset Alliance platform Android and licensed under the Apache License. The fonts are intended for use on the small screens of mobile handsets and were designed by Steve Matteson of Ascender Corporation...

 font (merged with Droid Sans Fallback) and readable in compact sizes.

Bitmap Song

WenQuanYi Bitmap Song (文泉驿点阵宋体) has full coverage to GB 18030

GB 18030

GB18030 is a Chinese government standard describing the required language and character support necessary for software in China. In addition to the "GB18030 code page" this standard contains requirements about which scripts must be supported, font support, etc....

 Hanzi at 11-16px (9pt-12pt) font sizes.

Unibit

WenQuanYi Unibit (文泉驿Unibit) adopted the GNU Unifont

GNU Unifont

The GNU Unifont by Roman Czyborra is a free bitmap font that covers the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane , using an intermediate bitmapped font format....

'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 (character source from Mainland China) of Unicode and the standard of a character list from the 1988 List of Generally Used Characters in Modern Chinese and the 2009 List of General Standardized Chinese (通用规范汉字表).

The glyph is not from T-Source (character source from Taiwan) and H-Source (character source from Hong Kong). It does not conform with the standardized traditional character writing behavior of writers from Taiwan and Hong Kong. (For more information, please read Unihan.)

Some examples of characters with different glyph are: 別,吳,骨,角,過,這,草,放, etc.

External links

• wenq.org (Official site)
• wenq.org (Official site in English)
• wqy.sourceforge.net (Project on Sourceforge)