FounderType fonts

[Insectosaurus]

Hi, I'm interested in using the newer FounderType (方正) fonts that (I think) have all glyphs included in the 通用规范汉字表. I know there are few coders on this community and perhaps someone knows precicely what fonts offer all glyhs (I think at least the fonts branded "新" like 方正新楷体 do so?

 

There is also the problem of actually getting the fonts. They are available for free at the official website (http://www.foundertype.com/) but I can't see to register without Chinese apps or a Chinese phone number. Anyone know a way around this, or is already registered at the site?

 

Thank you.

[889]

You can register with 微信. Maybe WeChat registered with a non-Chinese number will work, I don't know. You'll just have to try.

[Insectosaurus]

1 hour ago, 889 said:

You can register with 微信. Maybe WeChat registered with a non-Chinese number will work, I don't know. You'll just have to try.

 

Thanks, but if I'd find a solution where I could avoid registering a WeChat account that would be preferable.

[Insectosaurus]

Hm, it seems like all FounderTpe fonts are missing a lot of less common simplifications from 通用规范汉字表. Why is that? Take for example ? for 餗.

 

To this day I've found very few fonts being able to handle all of them (I.Ming, Google's Noto fonts and WenQuanYi). These fonts can also handle all traditional variants.

[imron]

On 8/13/2021 at 7:37 AM, Insectosaurus said:

(I think at least the fonts branded "新" like 方正新楷体 do so?

You'll need the fonts with GBK in the name, still no guarantee that they'll have things like ? though.

[Insectosaurus]

6 hours ago, imron said:

You'll need the fonts with GBK in the name, still no guarantee that they'll have things like ? though.

 

How does this work in practice, considering these characters are part of the standardized list? Let's say CCTV are airing a documentary about dentistry or fields where rare characters might pop up in an interview or similar. I'm surprised there aren't more fonts for publishers to utilize for characters that are uncommon, but considered standard, but I haven't read enough such media to know wether or not it's a problem in real life.

[imron]

The gbk standard has more characters in it so gbk fonts are more likely to have rarer characters in them. 
 

For specialized characters that don’t exist, Unicode has a private use block, and you are free to create fonts with characters in that private use area, and then you can use that to display characters not currently defined.  You don’t need to create an entire font for this, just a font containing the characters you need.
 

Any text you create via this mechanism won’t be viewable by anyone unless they also have your font, but it is good enough for publications and one off special cases. 
 

i can’t speak as to why a font foundry wouldn’t put standardized but rarer characters in a font but I guess it’s a trade off between resources and perceived utility. 

[Insectosaurus]

Anyone know of a font like this one but for traditional characters? ?

[mikelove]

If you're just looking for a modern Song/Ming style font with good traditional support you could try the open-source Source Han Serif.

[Insectosaurus]

On 9/9/2021 at 5:32 PM, mikelove said:

If you're just looking for a modern Song/Ming style font with good traditional support you could try the open-source Source Han Serif.

 

I have it and I really like it (thanks for the recommendation anyway). It was more for aesthetic reasons I was looking for more fonts (i like my Anki decks beautiful and ever changing!).

 

Just to avoid any misunderstanding, the font I linked in my last post is a font turning components into images, which is handy for visual memory when learning to write characters.

[mikelove]

Ah, sorry, I was looking at the preview image and it seemed like it was just a nice looking Song.

 

For components to images you might be able to do some JavaScript trickery to crudely map traditional to simplified code points without changing the underlying card.