[Bug 162284] New: Simplified Chinese never displays

[propedor]

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http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162284         
           Summary: Simplified Chinese never displays
           Product: kde
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: Ubuntu Packages
        OS/Version: Linux
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: normal
          Priority: NOR
         Component: general
        AssignedTo: unassigned-bugs kde org
        ReportedBy: propedor gmail com


Version:            (using KDE 4.0.3)
Installed from:    Ubuntu Packages
OS:                Linux

On several systems running Linux, I've attempted to view Chinese text in KDE apps, and in all cases the simplified Chinese characters in the text are simply empty boxes.

The problem has been going on for more than a year.  When I researched it earlier, it sounded like it was a qt3 font mapping problem and would be fixed in KDE4; however, I'm still getting boxes in Konqueror 4.0.3 under Kubuntu 7.10.

Steps to reproduce:
1) Open Konqueror
2) Navigate to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character

Look right at the beginning where it says, "... or Hanzi (simplified Chinese:"
If you are experiencing this bug, the next character is an empty box.  Otherwise the simplified "han" character will display correctly.  For those unfamiliar with how the character should appear, it might be described as three marks on the left with an X-like figure on the right.

Known workarounds:
I read that users with zh_CN locale are not affected.
Last year I got simplified characters by installing a new Chinese font, which I believe was called HKSCS by LiquidX, but the link is now broken.

Details on which characters are misprinted:
10% of the thousands of Chinese characters were simplified last century, but some locales chose to not simplify (and keep what we call "traditional" characters).  But for 90% of characters and even some short sequences of them, the simplified and traditional representations are the same.  In "simplified" text, i.e. on sites in simplified locales or wherever a simplified character encoding is used, the characters that were not simplified (in that 90%) display fine in Konqueror and other KDE apps.  For example, where the "han" character in "Hanzi" is different from the traditional Chinese representation that follows, the "zi" characters are the same.  The point is, only the characters that got simplified are misprinted via this bug, leading me to suspect fonts and font substitutions rather than encodings as its cause.