How to use PC Chinese fonts?

[tinydot]

Hi,

Not sure where does this topic go to, so I just post it here.

Anyway, I just downloaded a couple of PC Truetype Chinese fonts and installed in my computer. However, they somehow turn to standard english fonts when I preview with a font viewer program. Same thing happened when tried using them at Photoshop/Freehand/Illustrator, all turn out to be english letters instead!

Why do they turn to english alpabets? And how do I use PC Chinese fonts? Must I use some kind of special keyboard??

I'm using Win2K system, and currently a design student.

[Paul Komski]

Suspect it is mostly a matter of the encoding being used and that the font is being substituted into an English equivalent for the underlying ASCI - even though the actual glyphs have been stored in the fonts folder.

You could try a Google search for Chinese Fonts etc; of which THIS PAGE (http://users.erols.com/eepeter/chinesecomputing/faq.html) begins to outline the problems and resolutions as an example.

I think it also depends on what language your operating system is set as (Win2K does have multilanguage support but I don't know how far this extends to Chinese and its variants), which applications you are using and whether you are just trying to read or also to write the characters.

Hopefully a bi-lingual Ango-Sino geek will look in and have much more specific advice.

[malcore]

Hi. This is a problem for English versions of Windows. While it is quite simple to use English fonts in a Chinese version of Windows, the reverse is not so.

You will need a program, such as the ones listed in Paul's link, to use Chinese in a program like Photoshop. I am lucky enough to have three systems, and use one (Linux) entirely for Chinese.

English versions of Windows even have difficulty displaying Chinese fonts from a Chinese website. You have to install a small Chinese Traditional language support program (automatic), but even so, about one third of any Chinese web page will come out in jibberish.

[Paul Komski]

As an afterthought; and seeing you are design student and are trying to use graphics programs on these fonts, it occurs to me that a font viewer may not be the right application to use. There is a program Font Creator (http://www.high-logic.com/) which you can use to open and edit TTFs (glyph by glyph that is); shareware, but you get use of it for 30 days. There are other downloadable freebies but FC works quite professionally. No harm to give it a try.

I have collaborated with a graphic designer on fonts that he has designed, because he had only ever worked with MACs. The way windows deals with TTFs is, incidentally, different in some fundamental aspects to the way that a MAC deals with them; the way they are masked and so forth. A TTF designed on a MAC will not necessarily render correctly (particularly at certain font sizes) when first transferred to a Windows Font Designer.

Guess why? Well its all to do with Microsoft's way of controlling things and their own copyright of their own designs. Nothing new there. :mad: