Sunday, February 20, 2011

Chinese font display

When learning Chinese characters, and particularly practicing writing them, as I do with Skritter, I find it helpful to have some models to copy, since part of my motivation in learning to write characters is writing them as elegantly as possible (I've got a long way to go).

This is a nice tool for testing a variety of examples of Chinese writing styles:
http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/calligraphy.html
Sadly you can't link to examples since the form uses POST, see image below.
(need to track down or develop a GET to POST converter for this kind of thing)
An example of text I used was
台北市 大同區 敦煌路 巷 號 之
since I needed to write my address to fill out a paper form for a Taipei road race.

WAZU JAPAN's Gallery of Unicode Fonts has a lot of freely installable Traditional Chinese fonts
http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_ChineseTraditional.html

I'd like to check out some web-based fonts for Chinese if there are some.

But see this good discussion of the limited set of Chinese fonts:
"Unlike English web designers, who have a relatively wide array of available typographical options, due to a lack of good common typefaces, Chinese web designers are cursed with a very limited number of fonts, of which 宋体 [sòngtǐ aka Mincho aka Song font] is undoubtedly used for more than 95% of the text on any Chinese website."
http://www.kavoir.com/2009/01/what-are-the-chinese-or-mandarin-web-safe-fonts.html

So maybe, for my own private purposes at least, I could put some of the .ttf files listed above online following this recipe:
http://randsco.com/index.php/2009/07/04/p680
I could do this by putting the .ttf files on my server, or even just reference their their current location?
Not sure what the legal/etiquette/practicality issues are with fonts.
(See below for a better solution using the commercial web font provider Fonts.com)

List of free web fonts (including some Japanese ones):
http://webfonts.info/wiki/index.php?title=Fonts_available_for_@font-face_embedding

There is a splendid demonstration of 76 different Traditional Chinese web fonts at Fonts.com
http://webfonts.fonts.com/en-US/Project/ChooseFonts#languages%3DW40%26page%3D1
they also have 144 Simplified Chinese fonts:
http://webfonts.fonts.com/en-US/Project/ChooseFonts#languages%3DW44%26page%3D1

A number of these fonts can be used for free:
Here's a static demonstration:
http://kai.dyndns.org/chinesefonts.html

This dynamic page I made allows you to display arbitrary text in a variety of fonts:
http://kai.dyndns.org/cgi-bin/chinesefonts.pl
That's pretty much what I wanted for study purposes!
http://kai.dyndns.org/cgi-bin/chinesefonts.pl?en=台北市+大同區+敦煌路+巷+號+之

The web fonts are even displayable directly in this blog post. The following lines of font-a-licious Chinese-text are regular selectable and copyable text, not images:
台北市 大同區 敦煌路 巷 號 之
台北市 大同區 敦煌路 巷 號 之
Also, myfontbook is a pretty good web site to see what fonts are on your computer, and look at them all at the same time for an arbitrary text
http://www.myfontbook.com/
(doesn't work on Ubuntu Chrome? works fine on Firefox)

Screenshots of Chinese-tools.com's calligraphy editor:
Screenshots of Chinese-tools.com's calligraphy editor

Update July 19, 2011:
Ancient calligraphy lookup site: http://www.9610.com/zidian/
Examples:
(mentioned on this Skritter forum thread)

Update April 26, 2015:
Arphic has some good Chinese fonts and you can test them online.
Thanks Thomas K.

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