Different font

[MarkNY]

Are you considering...or would you consider...adding the ability to select a font? I'm thinking particularly of FZ-Kai or a similar font.

Thanks.

 

[mikelove]

Are you considering...or would you consider...adding the ability to select a font? I'm thinking particularly of FZ-Kai or a similar font.

Thanks.

The main issue there is licensing fees - font foundries pretty much all seem to want a big flat annual fee, so we'd need to generate a lot of sales for a prospective Kai font add-on to cover that, and I'm not sure if there'd be enough interest.

 

[DotComCTO]

Mike,

I agree with MarkNY on this one. I find that the font used in the reader is tough for someone learning. I find that Chinese fonts that more closely approximate what I'd see in something like the New Practical Chinese Reader are far more comfortable on the eyes, and they're easier to read/understand as well. The built-in Chinese font tends to look more blocky.

There are some free Chinese fonts on the web. For example:

http://www.clearchinese.com/resources/fonts.htm

Fonts such as:
汉鼎简楷体

汉鼎简中楷

Seem a lot more readable to me. Anything you can do in that regard would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

--DotComCTO

 

[mikelove]

I agree with MarkNY on this one. I find that the font used in the reader is tough for someone learning. I find that Chinese fonts that more closely approximate what I'd see in something like the New Practical Chinese Reader are far more comfortable on the eyes, and they're easier to read/understand as well. The built-in Chinese font tends to look more blocky.

There are some free Chinese fonts on the web. For example:

http://www.clearchinese.com/resources/fonts.htm

Unfortunately, the fact that they're freely downloadable on the web doesn't mean that they're free for us to distribute - absent an actual open-source / free distribution license we can't take the chance of building one of these into our app and getting sued / getting our app booted from iTunes. However, we are looking at ways we might be able to let users install their own fonts - we're already doing that on Android; the problem is that if we design an interface around one font it's very difficult for us to guarantee that it'll also work well with others, different character sizes / line positions / etc can really screw things up.