Use font of your choice in Ankimobile

[querido]

If it matters to you, here's an image of a real kaiti in Ankimobile.

Here I helped show that it can be done.

[valikor]

The links don't work for me.

[querido]

Very sorry, they do for me.

You could try right-click... copy link location and paste into your browser search window.

[gato]

Both dropbox and google groups are blocked in mainland China.

[querido]

"Ankimobile > webfonts > make a subset font"

Please observe any legal restrictions inherited by the subset font. I

suggest extracting from a *free* font.

The excellent howto on embedding webfonts here http://ichi2.net/anki/wiki/EmbeddingFonts

(which I haven't tried to use yet) says "most large fonts required for

complex scripts like Japanese & Chinese are unusable, as they will

take up too much memory and cause the app to crash".

But a subset of one of those fonts might be useable. The method below

extracts from my favorite font MS Simkai (11.5Mb) the subset of the

1300 characters in my vocabulary and produces subset.ttf (567Kb).

Here's how (I invite anyone to offer something simpler):

1. Install "Windows Phone Developer Tools Beta" available free from MS

here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c8496c2a-54d...

2. Open the "Expression Blend" application. Start a new project

(Files... New Project...). Open the font manager (Tools... Font

Manager...). In the top box, choose the font to extract from. In the

bottom box, I cleared the checkboxes and pasted the (whole) string of known

characters into "Include glyphs". Then do "Project... Build Project" (or

Project... Rebuild Project).

3. Down in the files produced, in my case "...Desktop\Expression\Blend

for Windows Phone\Projects

\WindowsPhoneApplication1\WindowsPhoneApplication1\obj\Debug\Fonts",

is Fonts.zip. Two .ttf are inside. They appear to be identical.

I found this method by googling on "subset font -pdf", which took me

to this MS developer howto page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc294629.aspx.

See the images there.

Easy! Does this help anyone?

My 1300 hanzi glyphs produced a .svg of 1.66Mb. This was downloaded in

about 10 seconds (I didn't count) and the app operates perfectly as

far as I can tell. (It's only downloaded to the iPhone/iTouch once. After

that it lives with any deck to which it is linked.)

Now, something like All_HSK_glyphs.svg made from a free font, at a

size of something like 5Mb, would be the thing to try.

There are minor imperfections in some of the characters probably

occurring in the conversion to .svg. Changing those settings at

fontsquirrel having to do with kerning or hinting (don't know what

those are) might fix that.

[rcloud19]

I just wanted to add that if you are jailbroken you can easily add the font of choice to your phone for use in AnkiMobile without the hassle of creating an .svg and then embedding it.

For directions: http://blog.gauravgiri.com/2008/08/tutorial-adding-extra-fonts-to-iphone/

The whole process takes no more than a couple minutes.