iPhone 4 & Chinese characters display question

[hanxue]

I got my first iPhone yesterday, and I'm loving it. However, I've noticed that certain Chinese characters will appear in bold, while others won't. For example, if I were to type 我们, the "我" will be in bold, and the "们" not. There are lots of other instances, even when just typing single characters where some of them will be in bold and some won't.

Why? Is it the same way on your iPhone 4?

[mikelove]

This is actually caused by a longstanding bug in iOS; basically, if the iPhone sees a random string of characters, rather than looking at the entire string to determine what language it's in / decide which font to use, it goes character by character. And since it seems to prioritize Japanese over Chinese, you end up getting characters that are also valid kanji rendered in a Japanese font, and characters that aren't rendered in a Chinese one. (们 as a simplified character isn't a valid kanji, while 我 is)

I don't know of a good workaround for this that doesn't involve jailbreaking, unfortunately, but some notepad etc type apps do a better job with it than others do, or allow you to select a custom font (so that you could pick a Chinese one and have the system default to that). Setting your OS language to Chinese would also help, though then of course you'd have Chinese text in menus etc instead of English.

[gato]

Setting the default language to Simplified Chinese should take care of the problem, if you are able to live with menus in Chinese.

[hanxue]

I think I had the same kind of problem on my Mac before, and when I dragged Chinese above Japanese in "Language and Text" panel on OS X, it fixed the problem. Is such thing possible on iOS as well?

[mikelove]

There doesn't seem to be a settings panel for that, no - it certainly wouldn't hurt to write to Apple support and report this a problem / request a fix, though.

There are a couple of official bug reports outstanding to them on this, I think - anyone else with an iPhone developer account who wants to speed this along can file a bug at https://bugreport.apple.com/, tell them they either need to provide a menu like in OS X or analyze the entire string before deciding whether to fall back on Chinese or Japanese first (kana -> Japanese, 简体(-only)字 or other non-Japanese characters -> Chinese).

[hanxue]

It looks pretty ugly as it is - that some of the characters are in bold and some not. :/

[msittig]

Thank you mikelove! This is a question I've wondered about after seeing it in other places besides the iPhone.

(Now if only I could get an answer to my question about the white boxes at the intersection of strokes in characters by certain older printers.)

[JenniferW]

I get what sounds like a similar effect on a laptop. There, changing font sorts it. Can you do that? On a computer I use Simsun for choice.

[hanxue]

I think I fixed the font issue! The other day I switched my iPhone language to 简体中文 for a min and then back to English, and voila, apparently it fixed the font issue too!! Now when I type pinyin all the characters look alike, no more bold ones and non-bold ones so the problem is fixed. I'm a happy camper.