Font Questions/Sources

L

ldolse

状元
I found a large variety of free/semi free fonts, reference site here:
Simplified
Traditional

I know that the bundled font included in Pleco was probably chosen as much for licensing as it was for compatibility. However it's a pretty large font, though admittedly most of the fonts on the site above are similar in size.

Of the fonts referenced there the ones I'm most interested in are MSSong (2.5 MB) and MSHei (1.8MB). Both of these fonts have over 26,000 glyphs, so I would expect they support the same characters as the bundled font (The old Simsun only supported 22,000). As long as one has a licensed copy of MSOffice then one has access to them from a licensing perspective.

My main question would be is their anything I'm losing by using one of these smaller fonts? I don't quite understand why they're SO much smaller than all the other fonts, yet they still contain more glyphs than most. I did a quick check on quality in MS Word, and I didn't see anything significant, but perhaps I didn't examine them in the right way.

Thanks,

Lee
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
A big part of the difference here is that our font includes embedded bitmaps, whereas most of these fonts are outline-only. Bitmaps are pretty much essential if you want to get a Chinese character to be readable on a low-resolution PDA screen; if you install one of these other fonts on your Pocket PC and configure PlecoDict to use it, most of the complicated characters will become borderline unreadable, because Windows can't figure out a way to shrink the character outline without shedding a lot of detail. A bitmap character has been hand-tweaked to look good and retain all of its important details at a particular resolution, so it'll look much better on a low-res screen. On a device with a VGA screen, though, these fonts should look about as good as the one we include with our software.

Taking a quick look at MSSong, it doesn't seem like it covers any more characters than our font does; the reason for the 26,000 figure is because they're also counting component pieces (glyphs for common non-radical components, which don't have an actual character code and can't be accessed directly but are linked from other characters to save space). Like our font, it covers the basic CJK Unified character range but doesn't include the more obscure Extension A / Extension B characters.
 
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