Kai-style alternate Chinese font from the Basic Bundle

[yopadato]

Hi everyone,

I am trying to use custom fonts with Pleco. I was able to install and try several .ttf fonts files, but the font is only applied to the text in the dictionary, not to the ebook reader function (actually, one font was working with the reader, but I didn't like the style).

I own the Basic Bundle and I noticed one feature of the bundle is "Kai-style alternate Chinese font". Is this "Kai-style alternate Chinese font" becomes the default font in Pleco, or should I choose to use it in the settings ? If I can choose to use it, can anyone tell me where in the settings am I supposed to enable it ? I don't see anything related to an alternate built-in font, I can only see options to apply external fonts by selecting a .ttf file.

Am I missing something ?

Can anyone recommend Kai-style fonts that work with Pleco reader ? Are there fonts that support both simplified and traditional Chinese ?

 

[mikelove]

Sorry, that's only a feature on iOS - for that reason we make a point of not listing it as part of the Basic Bundle in the Android "Add-ons" screen or on our website store. We don't currently offer paid font add-ons through Pleco on Android - mostly because we can't be sure that a particular font will work reliably on any random Android device - but you can select whatever alternate Chinese font you want in Settings.

As far as the font not working in the reader: what kind of files are these? Are you exiting and reopening Pleco after changing fonts? I don't know of any reason why a font would work in the dictionary and not in the reader unless it's a PDF file or something else that overrides the default font; it's running through basically the same code in both places. It's possible that it might encounter some sort of an error loading the font that causes it to fall back on the system font, though.

(we've been thinking about doing our own FreeType port to Android in our next major update so that we no longer have to rely on a particular build of Android to render fonts reliably, but no firm timeline on when that might be ready)

 

[yopadato]

It's an EPUB file, and it's very strange because I was able to display that file with the customized font once, but it never worked again with any other font. I did close and reopen Pleco just to be sure, but it didn't work.

Do you know of any PC software I could use to edit the EPUB file properties ? Maybe I can check if the file is trying to force a specific font. Maybe Calibre ?

 

[mikelove]

Sorry, I'd totally forgotten about this (hadn't looked at the Android document reader code for a while) - we disabled custom font support in EPUBs a few releases ago because it was screwing up the pagination (couldn't calculate page sizes accurately and ended up with a lot of clipped / weird text). If you use Calibre or another app to convert your EPUB to plaintext, your custom font should work fine in that, but unfortunately it won't work natively in EPUBs at the moment.