A font with both hanzi and pinyin

[PKrJ]

I have been looking for a font which would have both Chinese characters and pinyin in the same image.

Example: the third row first column saying pin yin zi ku

I have been trying to buy that one in the Twinbridge website, but for some reason I cannot. Maybe my card (Electron) isn't valid for them. But that is another story.

Anyway, would anyone know any good font or a place to buy one?

[geraldc]

I don't think you're looking for a font, but rather an application that can produce both hanzi and pinyin for you.

This thread concerning Word and NJstar may help. Click here

[PKrJ]

Actually I am looking for a font. NJstar word processor is a good programme, but not what I need.

[mandarinboy]

Use a unicode font. There are support for pinyinion the unicode. For a better discription, go to: www.unicode.org.

[geek_frappa]

I don't think you're looking for a font, but rather an application that can produce both hanzi and pinyin for you.

"times new roman" is the best because it provides the extended fonts for tone marks and sufficient amount of characters for the hanzi ... i hope this helps... moving outside of the known fonts or fonts based in China increases uncertainty of desired results... IMHO

[Catdiseased]

but what about duo yin zi?

[nnt]

Under Windows, use Arial Unicode Ms , it's multilanguage and includes Hanzi and pinyin and many more glyphs

[geek_frappa]

Under Windows, use Arial Unicode Ms , it's multilanguage and includes Hanzi and pinyin and many more glyphs

yes! i almost forgot... installing your Asian (CJK) fonts for Microsoft Office (2002 or later is recommended) will give you a good collection of Unicode fonts... thanks, nnt.

but what about duo yin zi?

what is that?

[liuzhou]

If you don' t have it, you can download the Arial Unicode font here.

It is 13.7 Mb and self installing.

[Catdiseased]

what is that?

characters that have different possibilities of pin yin, depending on situation in which it is used

[kentsuarez]

PKrJ wrote “I have been looking for a font which would have both Chinese characters and pinyin in the same image.”

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As geraldc points out at http://www.chinese-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=2392, you can have the character with pīnyīn above each if you like, which is available for example through a function in Word - Format - Asian Layout - Phonetic Guide, and I don't believe there is a font installed which underlies this ability, because Word lets you independently modify the size, content and justification of the phonetic info, and you can do it with any font. I imagine that, while creating a font with this info sounds reasonable, the developers didn't go that route, precisely because of the polyphony (poyinzi) of so many characters.

Simply enter or paste Chinese text, select it, and go to the function. The interface allows you to change the phonetics (which they for some unknown reason call "ruby text") in order to correct any resulting errors in the pīnyīn (or bopomofo) output adjacent to the characters, and also allows you to change the position (e.g., centered, right-justified, etc.) of the phonetic info. You can also change the font.

As for the pinyin or bopomofo portion, I just want to also point out that you can type anything you damn want there, manually change it (graph by graph) to Wade-Giles if you wish, or even English translations of each character, although there is a serious space limitation. You can use tone-bearing pinyin, copied from elsewhere, too, which looks quite nice, or type in pinyin with numerals if you like.

I type TC's and get only bopomofo; translating it to simplified leaves me with Chin char's only, no phonetics. Dunno why. I have posted the question of how to solve it in the other, abovementioned thread. If you're only doing a few characters, manually changing the phonetics to the kind you want works fine.

BTW, if your goal is merely to type pīnyīn (alone, or to accompany characters), or if you want to produce alternate tone-bearing pinyin to insert in the ruby text box even if you can only get bopomofo phonetics by default, you could in theory go through the laborious process of typing through the NJStar WP IME (IME = the tool which lets you type pīnyīn to write a Chinese character), selecting characters at random which match your input pīnyīn (with tone), then select the text, go to tools – convert Chinese to pīnyīn, and then use the result, but not only is this moderately inconvenient, it is also very problematic due to the unpredictable results of the conversion, as an outcome of the high polyphony in Chinese. To get around this, you’d have to be expert enough in Chinese (beyond the level of some native speakers, I imagine) to know to carefully select only monophonic graphs.

A better solution is thus to create the pīnyīn yourself, in which case you need *two* things:

1) You need a font which has āáǎà ēéĕè ī í ĭ ì ōóǒò ūúǔù ü ǖǘǚǜ, or what we call a pīnyīn-friendly font (meaning a Unicode font with extended content which enables these diacritical-vowel combos; some may have turned to white boxes here since the font in this site, if I remember correctly, is not pinyin-friendly). Helpful users above have already mentioned one or two such. AFAIK there are four pinyin-friendly Unicode fonts (acc. to http://www.csulb.edu/~txie/PINYIN/pinyin.htm):

"Microsoft Word 97 has a built-in unicode Pinyin font 'Lucida Sans Unicode'. The new Word 2000 has four Pinyin fonts: Arial, Courier New, Lucida Sans Unicode and Times New Roman".

If you type in Word, under the Symbols menu you can find all the vowel-diacritical combinations.

Using a pīnyīn-font does *not* mean that if you type a character through the IME you’ll get both the character and the pīnyīn. You’ll get only the character.

2) you also need an app that can produce both, e.g., letting you type pin1 to get pīn. See the above-mentioned relevant thread; NJStar Communicator enables this, although it is problematic. I will append initial comments on it in the next posting, and since I’ve only played with it, I hope others can help with the issues I’ll raise there.

You can also go to a website that has a converter, like http://pinyin.info/unicode/marks3.html (muchas gracias a Mark Swofford, aka Cranky Laowai, of Ban3qiao2, Taipei), type your pīnyīn with tone numerals like pin1yin1, then hit ‘convert’, then copy and paste that. It interrupts the workflow, but is a nice fix nonetheless, and kudos to him.

In Word, you can toggle between English and Chinese with the ctrl-space function, and each time you need a vowel with diacritical, insert it manually from the Symbols menu. It’s a pain, but possible.

If you’re a NUT, you can program every possible syllable-tone combo into Word via the Tools – Autocorrect function, as I have, so when I type bān ban2 bǎn bàn I get the diacriticals. Here, you’ll see none over ban2 because I didn’t program that combo; again, you must do this in a pīnyīn-friendly font as mentioned above.

The result of programming the full syllabary into Word through Autocorrect is stored in an .acl file, which can be found by searching for *.acl, and looking for the most recently modified file among the search results. The .acl file can be shared between users. The recipient of the file merely searches for *.acl to find out the location and name of the active (old) acl file, and renames it to keep it as a backup, then puts the new .acl file in the same location, and renames it with the original name of the old file. This will give you the other person’s entries, but you’ll lose your own customizations, if any, unless you go through an additional process of converting the files to text files, merging them, and reconverting them to .acl format, which I will not go into here (but if anyone has a link to info or an app for this, feel free to add it below).

Unfortunately, mine is also crammed full of so much other crap including shortcuts for personal info) that you wouldn’t want mine; it’s already reached its size limit, and new entries cause other stuff to drop out, something I didn’t know until recently. Of course, this feature is only available in Word, and only after a couple weeks of tediously entering the syllabary through Autocorrect. Not recommended.

But if you have this, you can type the tone-bearing pinyin, paste it into the ruby text boxes, and have a pinyin+char output.

A better solution for Word users would be to get Microsoft to include this in the default .acl file packaged with the Chin lang kits, as well as separately for download for anyone who doesn’t have the kits installed. I have brought this up with an extremely helpful MS insider, who is currently forwarding this request to the right people.

As for making tone-bearing pīnyīn be produced automatically through the IME, much as NJStar Communicator does it, I’ve also brought this up with MS, as it would enable such typing in any app, not just Word. My request has already reached the MS Pinyin IME developer, and seemed well received, but we’ll see, of course. I'm told that programming such things generally takes far, far more time and money than people realize.

[kentsuarez]

There is also info on how to do this via macros at

http://www.csulb.edu/~txie/PINYIN/pinyin.htm