Using Fontlink with the newer Simsun font in Pleco

ldolse

状元
Ran into a minor hiccup setting up Pleco. I just did a clean install so that my fonts would be in ROM rather than the SD card to keep everything happy. All well and good except I wanted the rest of the windows system to use the font. So I followed the instructions on MSDN. I'm familiar with the process, as I often do this with a smaller MS Song font.

It didn't work with the new font though. Eventually, after much messing around, I noticed that the older Simsun font (10meg version) that was formerly shipped with Pleco DOES work with the MSDN solution. The problem is with the new 8meg version of the font. It shares the same simsun.ttc filename as the old font, but internally the new font is called ZYSong.

Anyone else running into this issue, just follow the msdn instructions, but replace the string 'NSimSun' with 'ZYSong':
\windows\simsun.ttc,NSimSun
becomes:
\windows\simsun.ttc,ZYSong


Question though:
When the font was installed in the same directory as Pleco (default), I see two font options in Pleco prefs, SimSun and ZYSong. After I set up fontlinking, Pleco only shows me ZYSong. Have I lost anything here, or were these just aliases?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Yes, the font name changed but we kept the file name as "SimSun" so we wouldn't have to issue an updated version of the PlecoDict application with the new name embedded in it.

SimSun and ZYSong are theoretically two distinct fonts rather than aliases, so you did indeed lose something, but they're both the exact same character style, created by the exact same company and contain pretty much the exact same set of characters, so you really aren't missing anything by just having ZYSong (and are saving yourself 10 MB of storage space).
 
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