Boyang Yan

Chinese support

3 min read

Meta Scientific Linux To properly display Chinese, you must set the locale correctly and install the appropriate Chinese fonts.

locale settings

Install Chinese locale

In Linux, locales are used to set up different environments for running programs. Commonly used Chinese locales are (the most intuitive is the number of words that can be displayed):

zh_CN.GB2312
zh_CN.GBK
zh_CN.GB18030
zh_CN.UTF-8
zh_TW.BIG-5
zh_TW.UTF-8

It is recommended to use UTF-8 locale. You need to modify /etc/locale.gen to set the locales that can be used in the system (erase the comment symbol ”#” before the corresponding item):

en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
zh_CN.UTF-8 UTF-8

After executing locale-gen, the selected locales can be used in the system. You may use locale to view the currently used locale(s), and locale -a to view the currently available locales.

Enable Chinese locales

Warning: Globally setting Chinese locales in /etc/locale.conf will cause tty to display garbled texts due to the tty glyph limitation of Linux kernel. To properly display Chinese characters under tty, install and configure zhcon.

Set the global default locale to English (optional)

To avoid the tty garbled text issue mentioned above, globally set the LANG locale to en_US.UTF-8 in /etc/locale.conf:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8

User-specific locales

You may set your own user environment variables in ~/.bashrc, ~/.xinitrc, or ~/.xprofile.

  • .bashrc: Settings are applied everytime you log in using the terminal.
  • .xinitrc: Settings are applied everytime you use startx or SLiM to start the X interface.
  • .xprofile: Settings are applied everytime you log in using a display manager such as GDM.

Set Chinese locales for graphical interfaces

It is not recommended to set a global Chinese locale in /etc/locale.conf because it causes tty to display garbled characters.

As mentioned earlier, Chinese locale can be set separately in ~/.xinitrc or ~/.xprofile. Prepend the following two lines to one of the two files (if you are not sure which file to use, prepend to both):

  • Chinese as primary
export LANG=zh_CN.UTF-8
export LANGUAGE=zh_CN:en_US
  • English as primary 
    export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LANGUAGE=en_US:zh_CN

Note:

  • Be sure to put them before the exec example_WM_or_DE line in ~/.xinitrc.
  • This method is suitable for SLiM users or for people who do not use a graphical login interface (aka greeter). GDM and SDDM users can configure the display language in GNOME or KDE settings.
  • It is not recommended to override all locale settings with a global export LC_ALL. LC_ALL should be reserved for diagnostic debugging purposes only. LC_ALL will bring unnecessary difficulties for diagnosing language settings issues.

Chinese fonts

Install fonts

paru -S adobe-source-han-sans-cn-fonts adobe-source-han-serif-cn-fonts noto-fonts-cjk wqy-microhei wqy-microhei-lite wqy-bitmapfont wqy-zenhei ttf-arphic-ukai ttf-arphic-uming

Reference List

  1. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Localization/Simplified_Chinese

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