GNU/Free or public domain Simplified Chinese fonts?

[drencrom]

I am looking for at least three free licensed (GNU or other open source style) or public domain Simplified Chinese fonts. This is for a project in Ankidroid, which will implement a rotating list of fonts, so as to keep the memory fresh, and memorize the character, not the font. A recent Princeton University study shows that using strange fonts helps the brain to memorize the words better than reviewing the same font every day. I have encountered the following problems:

1. Many links, including those from the otherwise excellent wazu.jp gallery and links given in previous posts on chinese-forums.com on this topic, are broken or do not include license information.

2. Many great fonts I've found with acceptable licenses are too similar to each other. I need fonts that are different. Not just variations on SimHei and SimSun, but crazy-looking fonts. Not so crazy they're illegible, but according to the research the brain learns better with crazier fonts.

If you can help, please include: the font name, the font's license, writing systems supported, and a link (hopefully to a landing page where the license is displayed) where the font can be downloaded. I hope this font-rotating feature will soon be included in Ankidroid and make its way back to mainstream Anki. Thanks everyone!

[jbradfor]

Failing that, maybe you can use font mangling algorithm to take any font and twist it, similar to what is done for capchas? That was has the additional advantage of being able to scale the amount of twisting: I'll take a small mangling, please, while others might want more.

You might also want to look at this thread for font ideas. I don't recall what the conclusion was.

[imron]

I am looking for at least three free licensed (GNU or other open source style) or public domain Simplified Chinese fonts.

You'll have great difficulty finding them. For free licensed fonts you're basically looking at the Arphic Songti and Kaiti fonts, the Wenquanyi Heiti fonts, and Han Nom (Vietnamese but with a large number of Chinese chars) and Hanazono (Japanese but with a large number of Chinese chars).

There are a few more options if you are going for Traditional characters with the 王漢宗 fonts.

This page has a bunch of fonts that it says are "free for download" that were created by the University of Heidelberg, but their link back to the University of Heidelberg is broken making it difficult to verify the license used by these fonts (I also got no reply when I sent that site an email asking for more information), and no luck when searching the University of Heidelberg's website.

I don't recall what the conclusion was.

The conclusion was that I licensed some handwriting fonts from Founder, but these fonts are not open-source so would not be suitable for using in an open-source project.

[blavatsky3]

Has anyone been successful in finding any open source chinese fonts ?

 

Any help is appreciated.

 

Thanks

 

Richard