Lacking Support for Japanese/Chinese Characters in Team Fortress 2

[ghost]

Currently, for Team Fortress 2, Japanese characters (hiragana, katakana and kanji) are not rendered. This makes reading the chat and plenty of player names impossible. Suspecting that it is a font issue, but not sure why Valve wouldn't be rolling their own font. On the other hand, the fonts used by Steam are general are worse under Linux.

[xgdgsc]

Also with CS:Source. Adding some free font support like wqy-microhei should be fine.

[ghost]

Is there any roadmap or official statement on when/if this issue will be fixed? Asking for everyone to switch to English or write in romanji because you can't see what the others are writing in the chat is hardly going to get you any friends when playing.

[x414e54]

Confirming that this is still a problem across all source games.

[jincreator]

Not only affected to Chinese/Japanese, it also happened at Korean(called hangul) with almost every Valve Games running on Linux(i.e TF2, HL, Portal, ...)! Why there's nothing updates about this bug for almost years? This bug is critical to CJK users and I believe it should be fixed as soon as possible or at least until Steam OS/Console released.

[vkargov]

Still a problem (up-to-date TF2, Ubuntu 14.04). Kana, Kanji, Hanzi and Hangul are not rendered in chat and player score board which makes it impossible to read messages and player nicknames. Is there any known workaround to fix this?

[copywrong]

@vkargov I have exactly the same issue.

[ghost]

Makes playing the game impossible if you can't even change control settings. Switching to English doesn't help either.

[ghost]

For Debian and users of related distributions: Installing wqy-zenhei from a package fixed the problem. This is a good workaround, but I think Steam should properly support a Japanese font for Japanese language, and set itself properly when a language is picked.

Also, a user commented that Team Fortress 2 uses the Steam UI language preference, not the game language preference. This is somewhat silly.

[vkargov]

@talexand I can confirm that this works! Steam should probably suggest installing the packages automatically when it sees that some game needs them. Likewise, it would have been nice to see a warning from TF2 that it could not locate the necessary font.

[moontide]

Screenshot (installed steam 1.0.0.48-3.fc20 i686 on Fedora 20 x86_64):

The steam menu from tray icon displayed chinese well, other GUI all displayed like the screenshot. Chinese fonts are installed of course. This steamcommunity post doesn't suitable for Fedora: the packages does not exists in Fedora.

[AegirVOD]

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Steam Hope this would help.

[ICHx]

installing wqy fonts does help in arch, but I could not see any effect in OpenSUSE 42.3

in addition to wqy, my system also have noto cjk fonts installed

[m31317015]

The fact that I installed all available ttf in my Windows 10 system into the new Ubuntu Portable System is purely stupid, what's more stupid is that even if I have dozens of fonts with Chinese and Japanese supported it just don't work. It even uses the font that is able to support both languages.

Is this not going to be fixed for Source 1?

Edit: Steam works fine thou, not for Source 1.

Edit 2: I'm so stupid that I didn't include specs... Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty AMD Ryzen 7 1700X @ 3.85Ghz Corsair Dominator Platinum 64GB Zotac GTX 1070 FE SLI All above are water cooled, with proper drivers installed and running. Fonts are working in other applications such as discord and Wine.

[argxentakato]

When I displayed TF2 in Japanese, I did not like the font collapsing, so I played TF2 in English, but at last the English font was not drawn properly even at last. What the heck?

Computer Information:
    Manufacturer:  Unknown
    Model:  Unknown
    Form Factor: Laptop
    No Touch Input Detected

Processor Information:
    CPU Vendor:  GenuineIntel
    CPU Brand:         Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2520M CPU @ 2.50GHz
    CPU Family:  0x6
    CPU Model:  0x2a
    CPU Stepping:  0x7
    CPU Type:  0x0
    Speed:  3200 Mhz
    4 logical processors
    2 physical processors
    HyperThreading:  Supported
    FCMOV:  Supported
    SSE2:  Supported
    SSE3:  Supported
    SSSE3:  Supported
    SSE4a:  Unsupported
    SSE41:  Supported
    SSE42:  Supported
    AES:  Supported
    AVX:  Supported
    CMPXCHG16B:  Supported
    LAHF/SAHF:  Supported
    PrefetchW:  Unsupported

Operating System Version:
    Linux 4.9 (64 bit)
    Kernel Name:  Linux
    Kernel Version:  4.9.73-1-lts
    X Server Vendor:  The X.Org Foundation
    X Server Release:  11906000
    X Window Manager:  Metacity (Marco)
    Steam Runtime Version:  steam-runtime-beta-release_2017-10-05

Video Card:
    Driver:  Intel Open Source Technology Center Mesa DRI Intel(R) Sandybridge Mobile x86/MMX/SSE2
    Driver Version:  3.0 Mesa 17.3.1
    OpenGL Version: 3.0
    Desktop Color Depth: 24 bits per pixel
    Monitor Refresh Rate: 30 Hz
    VendorID:  0x8086
    DeviceID:  0x126
    Revision Not Detected
    Number of Monitors:  1
    Number of Logical Video Cards:  1
    Primary Display Resolution:  1920 x 1080
    Desktop Resolution: 1920 x 1080
    Primary Display Size: 32.28" x 18.11" (37.01" diag)
                                            82.0cm x 46.0cm (94.0cm diag)
    Primary VRAM Not Detected

Sound card:
    Audio device: IDT 92HD90BXX

Memory:
    RAM:  7867 Mb

Miscellaneous:
    UI Language:  English
    LANG:  ja_JP.UTF-8
    Total Hard Disk Space Available:  937367 Mb
    Largest Free Hard Disk Block:  793031 Mb
    VR Headset: None detected

Recent Failure Reports:

[yhlfh]

installing wqy fonts does help in arch, but I could not see any effect in OpenSUSE 42.3

in addition to wqy, my system also have noto cjk fonts installed

Installing wqy fonts doesn't work in openSUSE because the font package in openSUSE is the new version, and font name is actually 'WenQuanYi Zen Hei Mono', not 'WenQuanYi Zen Hei. The following lines will fix:

<match target="pattern">
  <test qual="any" name="family"><string>WenQuanYi Zen Hei</string></test>
  <edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="same"><string>WenQuanYi Micro Hei</string></edit>
</match>

[Tiagoquix]

Is this still relevant as of 2024?

[GuestSneezeOSDev]

is this still an issue i think there is a community of mods that can support it

[kisak-valve]

Closing pending feedback.