a colleague of mine in japan contacted us asking whether our in-world
collaboration tools could be extended to support japanese characters
— he had tried our internal, public sametime 3d servers and had
noticed that while in-world chat and instant messaging worked just
fine, our flipcharts, brain storming boards, calendar, and voting
tools did just display rather boring little rectangles 
not good. even worse when it means lost leads. so i set out to
investigate. since OpenSim is being used in japan, it was a fair
assumption that we might have a font problem here. this was confirmed
by a twitter from
adamfrisby:
@DrScofield so it should load fine.Only issue you need to be aware
of is fonts – you need to use a font with the correct charset
availible.
so, first port of call: how are we specifying the font to use for text
rendering? digging through the OpenSim source i ended up in the
VectorRenderModule:
private void GDIDraw(string data, Graphics graph, char dataDelim)
{
Point startPoint = new Point(0, 0);
Point endPoint = new Point(0, 0);
Pen drawPen = new Pen(Color.Black, 7);
string fontName = "Arial";
float fontSize = 14;
Font myFont = new Font(fontName, fontSize);
SolidBrush myBrush = new SolidBrush(Color.Black);
...
gulp: we’ve got it hard coded
so, next question: can we change it dynamically? looking through the
code, it seems like we might:
...
else if (nextLine.StartsWith("FontName"))
{
nextLine = nextLine.Remove(0, 8);
fontName = nextLine.Trim();
myFont = new Font(fontName, fontSize);
}
...
except, hmph, there is no osSetFontName() OSSL function
a couple of SMOPs later, we had osSetFontName() and could also
configure the default font name in OpenSim.ini, good. now to figure
out which linux font would do the trick.
i tried:1
- Arial — no good: doesn’t have japanese script support
- DejaVu Sans/Serif — again, no good, no japanese script support
- Kochi Mincho — works!
— the configuration for that one is:
[VectorRender]
font_name = "Kochi Mincho"
my next quest was to see whether i could find a font that would
support the whole range: european scripts as well as japanese and also
chinese.
…unfortunately, while windows users have Arial Unicode MS there is
no such complete beast available to linux users — yes, there are
fonts such as bitstream cybit, but their license conditions either
don’t allow commercial use or only for a single user. so, if you are
running under linux you need to localize your OpenSim installation via
OpenSim.ini.
but! at least we figured out how to get japanese character sets
supported in OpenSim on linux and can now configure one of our
sametime 3d servers to support japanese OpenSim users properly! 
