Poll: Font Styles?

[mikelove]

If it were possible, I would have voted for all. Wenlin is really not enough to get used to all possible scripts with which we often have to deal. The grave embarrassment of "What's written on this wall?" has to be dealt with!

We might consider that if the current batch goes well, though it's tricky to find fonts with comprehensive character coverage in the less common scripts - we're having trouble with our Xing-style font already because of that.

 

[mikelove]

Xing is now working, so the true typographical masochists out there should have this option at their disposal too:

 

[AdamD]

Fantastic.

 

[alanmd]

This looks awesome. I think getting used to this font (e.g. in flashcard testing) would be a good step towards understanding real cursive handwriting.

 

[houniao]

The new update is looking more and more awesome! Fantastic work, I must say. Especially looking forward to Cantonese support.
I voted for Kai, but would of course also really like to see Xing.

I actually use Kai for reading books on kindle. Once you've gotten used to it, the other fonts just don't look right!

 

[talimedicatus]

We should definitely avoid clutter with a lot of strange fonts. There should be a closed set for both simplified and traditional that reflects the use in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Here's my ideas for Traditional Chinese fonts. I think there should be 3 fonts for Traditional Chinese, that is, the 3 most commonly used ones.

1. Your typical Kangxi print-type.

2. Official Taiwanese government-sanctioned PMingLiu or an equivalent of it.

3. A similarly sanctioned traditional Kaiti font

These 3 are the most common fonts used in traditional Chinese. I think adding other traditional (maybe besides a clean sans-serif one) would be superfluous. I personally would especially like to see a block one (like in #1).

 

[mikelove]

Mostly a question of license fees with these - MingLiU we actually looked into licensing at one point but dismissed because it was way too expensive. So we'll see how well sales go for what we're probably going to call "Font Pack 1" and base further font licensing decisions on that.

 

[hoilm]

I have noted that discussions on font styles are limited to iPhone discussions. I'm keen to know if Pleco plans to add Xing, Song, seal and other scripts to android.

 

[mikelove]

Not in our immediate plans, though you can install whatever custom font you like in Settings. Two main reasons:

1) Lack of (reliably available) secure storage on Android; too easy for people to extract + steal our font files. (theoretically doable on iOS but much harder + far fewer people have rooted / jailbroken devices to do it on; easier at that point just to pirate the font some other way)

2) Compatibility; lots of Android devices have random weird hack-y font renderers. Even worse, some of them actually crash as soon as you try to load a font file they don't like.