Replacing ZYSong?

[thph2006]

Questions for Mike and the Pleco team:

I have a Samsung Mondi with 4.3" screen, WM 6.1 and plenty of storage space.

Q1: Is there any downside other than size to replacing ZYSong with Sun-ExtA for Pleco, e.g. readability, compatibility? (I'm trying to get all the radical characters to display in Ldolse's radical character flashcards).

Q2: If I replace ZYSong with Sun-ExtA will the Sun-ExtA be accessible to the entire WM 6.1 system or just Pleco? If only Pleco, is there a way to make it available to all applications including Pleco?

Q3: Is Sun-ExtA a superset of Sun-ExtB or would I need to install both seperately? If both are needed is there a way for Pleco to access both? Seems like I'd only have the option of replacing the ZYSong file with one but not both of the Sun files.

Thanks, tom

 

[mikelove]

Other people who've used Sun-ExtA more than I have might be better able to weigh in on this than me, actually, but for what it's worth:

1) With a VGA screen the difference should be pretty minimal; the fonts are all being rendered with enough pixels that the fact that ZYSong has been heavily optimized for small screens / includes embedded bitmap fonts for very small sizes shouldn't really make as much of a difference as it does on a non-VGA device. However, compatibility-wise there may be a few characters in ZYSong that aren't included in Sun-ExtA; most of the non-standard characters we use are in the PlecoExtra fonts, but we haven't yet rigorously checked that Sun-ExtA covers everything in ZYSong.

2) Pleco searches the \\Windows\Fonts folder for fonts on startup, so if you put the renamed Sun-ExtA in there and don't have a ZYSong file sitting around anywhere else on your system it should load it from there, and that would be accessible to other apps too (though they wouldn't fall back on it automatically unless you set up font linking).

3) Haven't looked at Sun-ExtB, so I can't say for certain, but if they're sticking to standard Chinese font design conventions it's most likely a superset. However, I don't think Windows Mobile even has native support for Extension B yet, so I'm not sure how much benefit you'd get out of using B instead of A - we haven't bothered adding ExtB support to Pleco yet since none of our fonts include those characters.

 

[ldolse]

I use Sun-ExtA as both my fontlinking font in windows and my zysong replacement. That requires the font in two different places. For Pleco the preferred location is in the program directory, using the same filename as ZySong. For 'all' apps you need to put it in the //Windows directory and set up fontlinking in the registry. Mike notes using //Windows//Fonts as an option to meet both requirements, note I've never succeded at making fontlinking work from there, so it's easier to make two copies.

I've never seen anything not covered in Sun-ExtA aside from a couple extremely obscure languages(and extension B chinese), It's the most comprehensive single font I've found anywhere. As Mike notes Pleco's uses of special characters is taken care of in their custom fonts, not zysong, so there aren't any problems in that respect either.

 

[ldolse]

Forgot to mention Sun-ExtB, best to just forget about that one, no way to make it work in Pleco as extension B isn't supported. For Windows only one font is supported for Fontlinking, and this font is too specialized to be of value in that use case.

 

[s85]

I've replaced standard Pleco font by my system font (My PDA has a Chinese WM). It's better as it is 黑体 type of font, now using Pleco to read books is so comfortable.