Fonts displaying Hanzi and Pinyin together

[georjungcocaine]

Hi y'all! First off, I want you to know that I am posting here because this is clearly a major resource to learn Chinese; so cut to the chase:

I am looking for fonts displaying full pinyin set alongside hanzi. I know the best ones are 1) Arphic UniFonts 2011 (字達人2) for Windows 2) Dynafont 金蝶 2010 H.K. Edition , but their prices are also prohibitive.

Some of you may be thinking about Microsoft Word option but.....

So if somebody knows about a site to get some package of those above mentioned, or an open source development project, or whatever,I'll watch out for a reply.

Thank you very much in advance.

PS:I think it'd be great to have a specific thread about software resources, so that's my suggestion.

[imron]

No font like this will be accurate due to the large amount of characters with multiple pronunciations.

[georjungcocaine]

Thank you for your reply; yet, I do not understand what you mean , because the fact is that,actually, those fonts do exist.

I'll keep on watching for a concise reply.

[georjungcocaine]

What I am really interested in is, rather than bopomofo, romanized pinyin, kinda

Just to clarify the issue.

[Ruben von Zwack]

A ridiculously common word like 行 has 3 pronounciations, and the first two, xíng or háng, are equally common. I guess that's what Imron meant. Hope this is concise enough

PS - but I agree, such font would be nifty, even if I do have to choose the pronounciation. My windows 7 doesn't even want to do Hanzi or Pinyin, none of them, don't know why.

[imron]

I do not understand what you mean , because the fact is that,actually, those fonts do exist.

Yes, they do exist, but they are not very good, for the reason I mentioned above. For example, with the character 了 should the pinyin be le or liǎo? And the answer is, it depends on context.

For example, with 太好了 you would want it to be le, but for something like 了解 you would want it to be liǎo.

Unfortunately if you are using a font, then each character can only have a single pronunciation and so this sort of system is extremely limited in use. You're better off using the Pinyin annotation in Word.

[georjungcocaine]

Finally I've managed to download 金蝶 2010 H.K. Edition pro, 10 GB which provide the excellent ruby learning option, that is, the most frequently used pronunciations are offered on the top of the list; you can even choose between monospace and proportional characters in a single font. Just great.

Thank you for your answers.

[imron]

that is, the most frequently used pronunciations are offered on the top of the list;

Just be aware that if you are using this for learning purposes then there is a high likelihood you will be learning inaccuracies unless you are also manually looking up each character and correcting for when the pinyin is incorrect.

This is something you really need to be careful with, because most characters won't have a problem, and so it's easy to think it's not worth checking, and so it's easy to miss the few that do. Even if it was say 95% accurate, that's 1 character in 20 that will be wrong.

[Hofmann]

Long ago I messed with one of these fonts. It actually came in multiple files, so I guess I should call it a typeface with many fonts. Changing the font would give less popular readings. It's troublesome though.