Whereas understanding the french language is a problem for most people in the world, english might be ok. Thus, in order to be understood by everyone, I will write titles both in french and in english, and texts in english (though my english level is quite bad).

Installing fonts might be a problem for newbies discovering any distribution of linux, even ubuntu. Here are some tips related to japanese fonts :

• With Windows, japanese common font is MS明朝. With GNU/Linux, it is IPA明朝. I recommend downloading it from here. It is a set of fonts, you will get : IPA明朝/IPA Mincho, IPA P明朝/IPA P Mincho, IPAゴシック/IPA Gothic (Sans serif), IPA Pゴシック/IPA P Gothic.
• Several interesting fonts are also available here. Just scroll the bar and you will see all available fonts.
• You can get also other japanese fonts with synaptic : search with “font” and “japanese” as keywords and you will get a list of available japanese fonts.
• Finally copy all your fonts in a new folder, called “.fonts”. When copying is finished, put your folder in the /home/Your_Name directory, where “Your_Name” is your user name.
• This is not exactly the purpose of this post, but for western language like french or english, I recommend using Freeserif. This is the font I used for my graduation thesis. You can get it with synaptic, or in a terminal :

sudo apt-get install ttf-freefont

• One more thing : It might be a safe assumption to say that the following Ph.D., Le rôle des suffixes en /+rV/ dans l’expression du lieu et de la direction en japonais et l’hypothèse de leur origine “altaïque”, has been writen with a Latex editor. The font used is pretty great, and I have found it, downloaded, installed, but I didn’t get it successfully working with OpenOffice.org. In case you wish get it a try, the name of the font is Latin Modern Roman. But I think the probability that a newbie get it successfully working is low.