Missing variant of the traditional character 懲 in the Pleco database?

[miri83]

Hi, I didn't know where to put this on the forum, so I put it here.

I just noticed that in Pleco the character in the headline differs from the one in the stroke order diagram. The latter has an additional Héng under the radical 山. I checked a couple of online dictionaries and they only show the version with the additional Héng, whereas my Mac only gives me 懲.

Which dictionary would you check to see which form is the more common one?

 

[mikelove]

This is a font variation, i.e. as far as the computer is concerned the characters are identical and which way it's rendered depends on your current Chinese font.

According to [Unicode](https://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U4E00.pdf) at least, all 3 Chinese variations (the 3 on the left below) have that extra stroke - the only version missing it is the Japanese one in the middle. So I'm guessing that your Mac is configured to use a Japanese font ahead of a Chinese font in its font fallback list, which is why it's showing that version.

As for why it would be displaying in Pleco without that stroke, though, are you on iOS or Android? Are you using a custom Chinese font? The iOS system "PingFang" Chinese fonts all seem to draw it with that stroke, but perhaps you have somehow ended up with a font optimized for Japanese on your phone as well?

 

[miri83]

I seem to have solved the problem on the Mac, or it solved itself, but now it works and the character is displayed correctly.


As for my smartphone, I'm on Android and don't use a custom Chinese font. I once had the Japanese system font installed, though. I just installed the Hanp*** dictionary and the character is displayed properly in there.

Back in Pleco, I see the correct character in the input selector but it is displayed wrong in the search field above (see attached screenshot).

 

[mikelove]

That's odd - check Settings / Fonts, is there a custom Chinese font installed in there?

 

[miri83]

No, no custom fonts are installed.
I just ticked "Force built-in Chinese fonts" and this solved it for me.

Checking an older Android phone of mine, I got the exact same behavior.

 

[mikelove]

Hmm, maybe a bug slipped into our embedded font file - will investigate, thanks for pointing this out.

 

[miri83]

You're welcome.
Are there any drawbacks from having "Force built-in Chinese fonts" on other than not being able to use custom fonts?

 

[mikelove]

No, in fact we're probably going to switch to *only* having that option soon; the current approach of embedding our own fonts was an accommodation dating back to when not every Android phone shipped with a comprehensive Chinese font file, but that's not something we really need to worry about anymore, and we can probably just stop including our own Chinese fonts altogether and make the app a lot smaller in the process.

(and of course there'll still be the option to override fonts if you don't like the system ones - perhaps now that there are a number of good open-source Chinese fonts we might even let people download + switch to them in-app like we do with our paid add-on fonts on iOS)