Font with Traditional and Simplified characters

[imron]

On 8/1/2020 at 2:48 AM, 889 said:

Easy peasy.

We have vastly different opinions on what is easy peasy - both in terms of effort to create the fonts, and effort to use the fonts, switching from one font to the other multiple times in a text to get the pinyin rendition you want.

[Demonic_Duck]

IMO a font-based approach is almost always^[1] the wrong one for ruby text of any type, whether the ruby is pinyin, zhuyin, or opposite trad/simp character set. Having multiple fonts adds an unnecessary amount of complexity, but it's at least preferable to using custom codepoints, which ruins accessibility and interoperability (as soon as someone copies and pastes your proprietary codepoints into another program, the original character is irrevocably lost).

 

You're much better off taking the text, running it through an automatic conversion tool, manually fixing any mistakes, then laying out however you want to present it. MS Word and HTML both natively support this approach.

 

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[1] Except for compatibility in contexts where for some reason you can control font selection but not other formatting. Even then, in places where you have that little control over presentation, maybe it's not the right place to be thinking about ruby text. This would be somewhat analogous to overloading the "Mathematical Bold" unicode characters for use as bold text in plaintext-only contexts.

[roddy]

Hmmm, didn't realise HTML did that. Shouldn't be much trouble (for someone else, I mean, it'd be an enormous pain for me) to come up with a web app that does an automatic conversion and then highlights possible issues for inline editing?

[Demonic_Duck]

On 8/3/2020 at 1:33 PM, roddy said:

didn't realise HTML did that

 

Maybe I overstated my case - HTML still doesn't "do" anything. It's just a useful medium for expression.

 

On 8/3/2020 at 1:33 PM, roddy said:

Shouldn't be much trouble (for someone else, I mean, it'd be an enormous pain for me) to come up with a web app that does an automatic conversion and then highlights possible issues for inline editing?

 

Looks like there's one here:

https://ethantw.github.io/az/

Covers zhuyin and pinyin, but unfortunately not OP's use case of simp/trad.

 

However, it'd be trivial to create a markup generator that takes simp or trad as input, outputting HTML with ruby text. Might make a proof of concept this evening if I have time.

[Tomsima]

what about dealing with the vastly different official pronounciations for Taiwan and Mainland? Seems to be most automatic markup gives Taiwan pron for traditional and mainland for simplified. I get why, but it just really just grinds my gears how its automatically determined by what character set you're using...

[Demonic_Duck]

30 minutes ago, Tomsima said:

Seems to be most automatic markup gives Taiwan pron for traditional and mainland for simplified.

 

The link I just posted doesn't, looks like it consistently gives preference to the Taiwan standard, even with simplified characters.

[Demonic_Duck]

On 8/3/2020 at 2:27 PM, Demonic_Duck said:

Might make a proof of concept this evening if I have time.

 

Here's the proof of concept:

 

Traditional ⇄ simplified ruby-text generator

 

Works pretty smoothly, though the conversion itself probably isn't great with ambiguous characters (the library I used states that the supplied conversion dictionary is mainly just for testing purposes) and I swapped out the conversion library so it's now decently accurate.

 

[imron]

12 hours ago, Demonic_Duck said:

the original character is irrevocably lost

Although I agree about your general point that custom codepoints are almost never the correct solution,  the characters won't be irrevocably lost because copy/paste should still preserve the codepoint, it will just be displayed as a blob or a ?.  You'll still be able to copy and paste those blobs back to the original program and have them displayed correctly.

[mikelove]

15 hours ago, Demonic_Duck said:

Having multiple fonts adds an unnecessary amount of complexity, but it's at least preferable to using custom codepoints, which ruins accessibility and interoperability (as soon as someone copies and pastes your proprietary codepoints into another program, the original character is irrevocably lost).

 

FWIW there actually is a standard for showing traditional characters using simplified codepoints, GB/T 12345-90 - it maps each simplified character to a default traditional character but then adds about a hundred additional code points for one-to-many mappings and such. (those simplfiied-to-traditional fonts I mentioned earlier generally use that standard)

 

In theory a well-designed text encoding converter in a web browser should be able to accept GB/T 12345-90 as an input encoding and output the appropriate Unicode, though I'm not sure if any actually do - it doesn't look like it's included in ICU which is what Apple/Google base a lot of their internationalization code on.

[Demonic_Duck]

10 hours ago, imron said:

You'll still be able to copy and paste those blobs back to the original program and have them displayed correctly.

 

True, but it's not sharable with someone who doesn't have the same software or if the software becomes unavailable. I guess it's not lossy per se, but it might as well be.

 

7 hours ago, mikelove said:

FWIW there actually is a standard for showing traditional characters using simplified codepoints, GB/T 12345-90

 

That's actually pretty cool, though I guess more of historical interest than practically useful as it's not Unicode-compliant.

[imron]

On 8/4/2020 at 11:28 AM, Demonic_Duck said:

True, but it's not sharable with someone who doesn't have the same software

It is if you share a font that contains those custom codepoints.

[Demonic_Duck]

Fonts are a type of software too (at least by some legal definitions).

[NinKenDo]

Google Noto has visually consistent fonts for both Simplified and Traditional style.

 

Please note that because of Unihan, you need to apply the right font based on whether the text is supposed to be Traditional or Simplified.

 

For webdev technologies I found styling (i.e., setting the font family) based on the lang attribute, and then marking text as Simplified or Traditional using lang was the easiest way to make sure the right font is being applied.

[zhouhaochen]

Thanks so much for everyone's replies, some of which I have to admit went beyond my personal technical abilities, however this has been super helpful. So many things I dont know yet....

 

As the exact thing that we were looking for doesn't seem to exist and our teaching department is not particularly strong or interested in any kind of coding, we want to use a traditional character font that also displays Pinyin. iFont does offer this as a pay for solution, though they just threatened me with legal action while I was enquiering about which version to buy of their plans, which I did not find that great customer service.

 

Does anyone know another font that is Traditional Characters with Pinyin (giving the option to correct the pinyin in case a 多音字 has the wrong pinyin written on it)? I attached a first version of a teaching pdf we are planning to use there in case anyone is interested.

 

If, not we might just buy the iFont ones, though that last email about legal action against a potential customer really did not encourage me to purchase.

 

Will share any experiences with whatever we end up using.

 

TP - Intro 9 - How Much.pdf

[Demonic_Duck]

I guess the reason you still want a font-based solution is that PowerPoint doesn't seem to support ruby annotations? It's a shame, there are probably ways to work around it, but they might be a bit fiddly.

 

In your example, I noticed there are a few problems with 轻声 (东西 should be dōngxi not dōngxī, etc.) and some weird issues with font mismatches and switching between simplified and traditional, especially with 个/個. Hopefully just teething problems that can be sorted out with the right font. Will be interested to see how you get on!

[Demonic_Duck]

OK, last-ditch plug for a non-font-based approach: TABLES — the one thing every web developer is taught to never use for formatting. ?

 

Seems to work pretty well across platforms. Pasting into Google Slides and PowerPoint works (with some adjustment), and it even works here in this forum!

 

nǐ	wèn	wǒ	ài	nǐ	yǒu	duō	shēn
你	问	我	爱	你	有	多	深	，

 

wǒ	ài	nǐ	yǒu	jǐ	fēn
我	爱	你	有	几	分	？

 

Limitations:

• Not great for copying rendered → plain text (ends up with loads of blank space)
• Line breaks must be handled manually

 

Should also be easy enough to create an online generator for this, if someone (probably a future version of me) has the inclination.

 

[zhouhaochen]

thanks so much for the suggestions @Demonic_Duck

As a teaching institution we are unfortunately quite poor in anything IT related (which is quite an issue as we are currently programming a huge online teaching portal from scratch - though thats different people thank God) so we went for the easiest version and bought the font, while swallowing my anger about those rather rude email replies.

 

I will report on how it went.

 

[roddy]

Let us know how you get on with handling 多音字...

[zhouhaochen]

After buying the font and finally receiving the terms and conditions and a week of clarifying questions we had to return it. It took me a while to understand their terms, but basically iFont wont allow users (even for the “corporate license") to make any materials created with their fonts public. We want to put all our teaching pdfs on a "free for anyone to use" license and they would not allow that. They also have a clause in there saying you cannot "profiteer" from materials created with that font, whatever that means, but my thought was that if a company purchases a font they can use it for business which potentially could lead to profit (though in this case we actually want to make them available for free).

 

So we are back to the beginning ? I and our teaching department lack the technical abilities to create something ourselves like suggested above and we need a traditional character font that also displays Pinyin that we would be allowed to use in teaching materials that also others would be allowed to use for free.

 

Any suggestions?

[Demonic_Duck]

5 hours ago, zhouhaochen said:

iFont wont allow users (even for the “corporate license") to make any materials created with their fonts public. We want to put all our teaching pdfs on a "free for anyone to use" license and they would not allow that. They also have a clause in there saying you cannot "profiteer" from materials created with that font, whatever that means, but my thought was that if a company purchases a font they can use it for business which potentially could lead to profit

 

Sounds like their legal team has no clue what they're doing. Or more likely, they have no legal team but fancy themselves legal buffs.

 

5 hours ago, zhouhaochen said:

Any suggestions?

 

If you copy and paste the 《月亮代表我的心》 lyrics above into the software you're using and manipulate the formatting until you're happy with it, does if fulfil your requirements? If so, I can put together a generator for that type of thing pretty quickly. If not, it's probably not worth it.