Good font for Chinese/Japanese SRSing

Good font for Chinese/Japanese SRSing - Printable Version

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Good font for Chinese/Japanese SRSing - mukmuk - 2010-07-22

I am currently SRSing traditional hanzi and kanji simultaneously using Mnemosyne.

Can anyone recommend a font that shows both character sets accurately?

The best one I've been able to find is Adobe Heiti Std R from the Adobe Reader font directory, but a few things still bother me such as pinyin characters being missing and having a dot in 類　so that instead of 大 in the bottom I have a 犬　(although now I have the sneaking suspicion that these are the same character rendered in different ways by different fonts)

Does anyone have any fonts that look good　that render Japanese, traditional Chinese, and pinyin well, occasionally in the same card?

Are there other SRSs out there that can show multiple fonts?

Good font for Chinese/Japanese SRSing - rcloud - 2010-07-22

If you switch over to Anki you can easily set it up to use multiple fonts.

Good font for Chinese/Japanese SRSing - rcloud - 2010-07-22

Also, I really only study simplified characters so I could be wrong, but I believe that the dot is supposed to be there for the traditional form of the character for lèi. It is disregarded in the simplified form.

Good font for Chinese/Japanese SRSing - mukmuk - 2010-07-22

Thanks, rcloud.

Can you set up different fonts inside the same card?

btw these are the reasons I'm attached to Mnemosyne:
- A five-button response instead of the four button response (this is more of a preference)
- Anki seems way more complicated.
- I am going to get an Android phone sometime in the future and I want to be able to view my cards on there because there is this Android app that you can use Mnemosyne on.
- I used Anki a long time ago and the card spacings seemed odd - specifically if I graded a card "easy" the next showing of that card (which Anki helpfully shows) is a loooong way off

Good font for Chinese/Japanese SRSing - mukmuk - 2010-07-22

Yeah, but for るい (Japanese) that dot shouldn't be there.

Good font for Chinese/Japanese SRSing - rcloud - 2010-07-22

While Anki can take some time to learn all of its features, I greatly prefer it to all the other programs. While all of its options may seem complicated now, down the road as you learn more about the program they become greatly beneficial.

As for the multiple fonts, yes you can set up multiple fonts in the same card. Each piece of information is divided into different fields and each field can have its own fonts. So, if on your cards you have English, Hanzi, Kanji, Pinyin and the Japanese reading each one could have its own font and still be displayed on the same card.

Also, Anki has a free Android version: http://ichi2.net/anki/wiki/AnkiDroid

and with regard to the spacing... I find that if I find something easy I don't need to see if for a long time, but I grade conservatively and only mark something as easy if I know it like the back of my hand.

If you really don't like the spacing on Anki it gives you the option to change how it behaves.

Good font for Chinese/Japanese SRSing - mukmuk - 2010-07-22

Thanks, a lot of great points there. I'll keep them in mind.

Good font for Chinese/Japanese SRSing - zer0range - 2010-07-22

Another thing to keep in mind is that there are many different forms for characters, not just simplified and traditional, and different fonts will choose to use different ones.

It's even more apparent with handwriting, regional, age, and even personal differences will change a good amount of characters.

Good font for Chinese/Japanese SRSing - mafried - 2010-07-22

In terms of Unicode encoding however, most of these differences are distinguished by the font. So no, short of finding a way to switch fonts per-card, it's not possible.

Good font for Chinese/Japanese SRSing - mukmuk - 2010-07-28

Update:
I started using Anki on Monday. It's a really solid piece of software. (I'm reviewing nukemarine's set of 3007 Heisig Hanzi)

Thanks again to everyone in the thread for their input really am kicking myself for not starting sooner.

I'll probably be migrating my Mnemosyne flashcards over to Anki in the near future.

Good font for Chinese/Japanese SRSing - deathtrap - 2010-08-04

I don't leave home without my KaiTi :p I'm not sure if it will work for both Japanese and Chinese though.

Good font for Chinese/Japanese SRSing - luhmann - 2010-08-07

The best font you will find is "AR PL UKai", available here:

http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/CJKUnifonts/Download

It contains all Traditional, Simplified and Japanese Hanzi nicely drawn in kaishu style.

Good font for Chinese/Japanese SRSing - bflatnine - 2010-08-07

luhmann Wrote:The best font you will find is "AR PL UKai", available here:

http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/CJKUnifonts/Download

It contains all Traditional, Simplified and Japanese Hanzi nicely drawn in kaishu style.

No, it doesn't. It can't, because that's not how it works.

Many characters that are different in Japanese than in Chinese occur on the same Unicode code point. They are differentiated by the use of different fonts. An example is 直. Try rendering that with a Chinese font and a Japanese font. They will look different. No single font will be able to render both versions on the same code point.

And that's ignoring the fact that you said it contains "all" hanzi. Nope. No font does. The full Unihan database does not, and will not for a good long while. CJK Extension C, which was just recently released, added an additional 4149 characters to Unicode, but Extension D is already projected to include an additional 10,000. And that's after Taiwan withdrew over 6000 characters that they deemed to be no longer in use. So there are at least 16,000 extant characters that cannot be rendered in any font. And since there is no font I know of yet that can handle Extension C, the number is really more like 20,000. Plus, Extension E is already being planned, with over 1300 characters already included.

Even still, that falls 15,000 characters short of the number in the 異體字字典 online (106,230 characters).

edit: but I will say that the font you mentioned is nice. But it doesn't even cover Extensions A and B if I remember correctly, so there are only about 27,000 glyphs in the font. Hardly "all" of the characters, in any set.