For the last few years, we've been paying a rather hefty annual fee to license a Chinese font file for use in our Windows Mobile software. That license is now up for renewal, and given that a) a lot of people don't seem to be very happy with the readability of our Song-style fonts on mobile devices, b) it seems very likely that Microsoft will finally get on the building-Chinese-support-into-every-OS-language-version bandwagon with Windows Mobile 7, and c) every other platform we're planning / considering support for in the future (iPhone / desktop Windows / Mac OS X / etc) already has perfectly good Chinese fonts built in, we're thinking it might be better to switch to an open-source Chinese font on Windows Mobile, release ASAP a software update that makes it easier for users to plug in their own fonts, and put the large amount of money we'd be saving towards some new dictionary licenses. An added benefit to open-source fonts is that we're less restricted in what we can do to modify them, so if we want to, say, add a few hundred missing characters / symbols, we'd be freer to do that than we are now.
The two best open-source Chinese font options for mobile devices we've found so far are:
a) Firefly, based on the widely-circulated free Arphic TrueType Chinese fonts but with embedded bitmaps added to get it to render well on low-resolution screens; in Pleco at least this seems to look pretty much identical to the ZYSong font we use now. (the bitmaps are a little different, but since the vast majority of our Windows Mobile users nowadays seem to have VGA screens, embedded bitmaps aren't much of a factor anyway)
(there's a pretty nice Arphic Kai-style font too, but Kai fonts however beautiful seem to be borderline unreadable on small screens, so that's probably a no-go)
b) Droid Sans, the default font on Google Android. These are extremely professional-looking, generously Apache-licensed and are very nice and readable on mobiles, but don't really show the thicker / thinner points of stroke shapes as well as a Song-style font like Firefly or ZYSong.
Has anyone had any experience with either of these? Or is anyone willing to try replacing ZYSong with them and see what you think? (easy procedure, just rename the ZYSong font file in your \\Storage Card\Pleco folder to something like ZYSong-Old, copy the new font file to that folder and name it ZYSong; make sure Pleco's not running in the background when you do this)
It's not too late to re-up our license for ZYSong if these other options really seem to be a letdown (in any case you'd certainly be able to continue using it as long as you had a copy of it from a pre-switchover Pleco download), and I suppose we could also consider including both fonts in our software installer and letting people choose which one to use (or even switching between them) (perhaps eventually with a toggle button), but I think in general we'd be better off spending our money on new dictionaries than on fonts.
The two best open-source Chinese font options for mobile devices we've found so far are:
a) Firefly, based on the widely-circulated free Arphic TrueType Chinese fonts but with embedded bitmaps added to get it to render well on low-resolution screens; in Pleco at least this seems to look pretty much identical to the ZYSong font we use now. (the bitmaps are a little different, but since the vast majority of our Windows Mobile users nowadays seem to have VGA screens, embedded bitmaps aren't much of a factor anyway)
(there's a pretty nice Arphic Kai-style font too, but Kai fonts however beautiful seem to be borderline unreadable on small screens, so that's probably a no-go)
b) Droid Sans, the default font on Google Android. These are extremely professional-looking, generously Apache-licensed and are very nice and readable on mobiles, but don't really show the thicker / thinner points of stroke shapes as well as a Song-style font like Firefly or ZYSong.
Has anyone had any experience with either of these? Or is anyone willing to try replacing ZYSong with them and see what you think? (easy procedure, just rename the ZYSong font file in your \\Storage Card\Pleco folder to something like ZYSong-Old, copy the new font file to that folder and name it ZYSong; make sure Pleco's not running in the background when you do this)
It's not too late to re-up our license for ZYSong if these other options really seem to be a letdown (in any case you'd certainly be able to continue using it as long as you had a copy of it from a pre-switchover Pleco download), and I suppose we could also consider including both fonts in our software installer and letting people choose which one to use (or even switching between them) (perhaps eventually with a toggle button), but I think in general we'd be better off spending our money on new dictionaries than on fonts.