Pinyin, English, and Character Usable Font

[muyongshi]

I was wondering if anyone out there knows of a great font (free or not- I'm desperate) that can handle a pinyin input (I use biaoyin that is put out by the yale- chinese mac guys), can switch to english no problem and also has a full set of chinese character glyphs preferably based of a 楷体. I am a mac user and I am using in-design right now and the having to switch between font sets as I am writing in all three at the same time is just a HUGE pain in the arse.

Thanks!

[imron]

Most Asian fonts have horrible English/pinyin. You might want to look at Microsoft's yahei.ttf. It comes with Vista and although I haven't used it myself and so count vouch for it, it was designed to provide decent looking text in both languages.

Official download link here. (Requires a genuine copy of windows).

Edited February 28, 2009 at 04:15 AM by imron
added download link

[imron]

Just checked it out now in InDesign on my Mac, and it seems to work nicely, with nice English, pinyin and Chinese, although it's not 楷体.

Edited February 28, 2009 at 04:54 AM by imron

[renzhe]

You can try MS Arial Unicode.

AFAIK, it used to be a free download.

It's generally a high-quality font.

[muyongshi]

Thanks for those...I have them all and not quite what I was hoping for.

I actually decided against using the same font even if I could find it because it makes the pinyin stick out a bit more from the english by using a different font.

Thanks again!

[skylee]

muyongshi please don't leave us. stay.

[muyongshi]

muyongshi please don't leave us. stay.

I'm confused...I'm not going anywhere...

It's nice to feel loved

[Guest realmayo]

Does anyone know of a font which not only does what the above-mentioned fonts do (ie display characters, pinyin and english properly) but which also has the characters set substantially larger than the english and pinyin? At the moment, either the Chinese characters are a bit too small to read easily, or the english looks unnecessarily large and clunky. I've found some fonts where the sizes are different, but they can't cope with pinyin.

[vr2nr]

This is probably not what you are looking for, but I will provide it anyway. I always have had difficulty with Pinyin because of the Tone marks. My eyesight just is not that great. I typically just use the numbers. As well, many programs can deal with the tone numbers.

Some people have noted that its not as natural to look at the pinyin with numbers as it is to read pinyin with tone marks. My own experience is that if you spend just a little time (an hour or two??) reading pinyin with numbers, it is just as easy as reading pinyin with the tone marks. It takes care of the issues with regard to size (i.e., tone marks too small to read) as well as font issues.

I always use UTF-8 and it handles everything I need in every size.

[OneEye]

I guess it depends on what you mean by a "full set" of glyphs. Do you need something with 70,000 different glyphs (including CJK extension A and B)? Han Nom A and B are the only ones I know of that support CJK extension A and B, but they are 宋 and 黑, respectively, and their Roman letters suck.

IMO, STKaiti looks great in both Roman and Chinese characters, and doesn't distort pinyin. It "only" has 27,000-ish glyphs though, so again it depends on what you're doing.