Order of Strokes of Some Chinese Characters

[rizen suha]

does this mean that the current kai font for general use (dict and reading etc) is in danger of being no longer available (even having paid for it)? for me the kai font is an absolute must in pleco. to me it makes reading so much easier as it enhances the discernability of components and thereby the structure of the hanzi - it adds a dimension to the drawing that allows different hanzi to look, well, "more" different. oh my, i would be seriously desperate if pleco should lose the kai font.

 

[Shun]

Hello rizen!

I think he's only referring to the Kai font for the stroke order diagrams. Because you need to assign the strokes to parts of the characters for each font individually. If not, I stand corrected.

Cheers,

Shun

 

[mikelove]

I think he's only referring to the Kai font for the stroke order diagrams. Because you need to assign the strokes to parts of the characters for each font individually. If not, I stand corrected.

Yes, only for stroke order. The regular Kai font is much more solid licensing-wise, and in the unlikely event that something ever did happen with it, font licenses are pretty much never per-user but rather per-year (or perpetual), so it would be quite easy for us to license a different Kai font and replace the old one with that for free.

 

[rizen suha]

thx! let me just add that the current kai is seriously beautiful and perfect. i hope that if it has to be replaced some day, attention to perfection will be upheld

 

[MelissaLuc2003]

Default in Pleco is Song, yes. Kai is experimental / not heavily checked - based on the open-source Make Me A Hanzi project that also powers Inkstone - plus, while we feel pretty confident that its use of Arphic's open-source Kai fonts is legal, there are indications that Arphic themselves might not think so, and so we're reluctant to default to using it while there remains the possibility we might receive a C&D letter from them + be forced to abruptly pull it from our catalog.

But we're working on a brand new set of Kai stroke order diagrams, which will be more thoroughly checked, cover many more characters, and not have any licensing uncertainty around them, and once those are ready they'll probably replace Song as the default (also saving us some royalties in the process). Probably not until after 4.0, though. (the licensing is in place, but we haven't found the spare programming time to build the editor app which the people we'd hire to key in / check them would need to use to create them from the font we licensed)

@mikelove , Mike, I have version 3.2.35. Is this the latest? When is version 4.0 coming out? Thanks, Melissa.

 

[mikelove]

3.2.35 is currently the latest, though 3.2.36 should be out this week or next with some minor bug fixes.

We're making a point of not announcing release dates for 4.0, we don't want to rush it and be left dealing with bad / hasty decisions for years afterwords.