#Generate webfont software#
#Generate webfont download#

WebFonts is a new solution to the problem of missing fonts in web. For us programmers, one of things we can do is to help Hanzi as well as other languages live better in our Internet era.Ĭhap II. We are not sure which one will live longer. Internet just showed up several decades ago. It carries the entire history of Chinese civilization. Hanzi has been living for 3000 years since oracle. Should we give up Hanzi, or, as I thought before - abolish uncommon characters, unified using only 3000 common ones? Although it’s some kind of solution, but is not desirable after all. The downloading time will significantly damage users’ experience, not to mention the bandwidth costs.

#Generate webfont download#

It is impossible to let users download several MB of fonts when browsing several KB of web page. Google has already offered such online font services, but still don’t support Chinese. It will get fonts from the server when a web page is loaded. WebFonts solution is also facing the same problem. They could have paid a lot of effort just to save 1MB space, while I’m going to append 3MB all at once. The community considered it unacceptable, as the package itself is only 27MB. In order to support Chinese, I needed to embed a 3MB font into the release package. In 2011, I was working on Blender’s I18N system. But for some scenarios, size really matters. You might think it doesn’t matter, as storage is so cheap nowadays. If you really had a 'complete Hanzi font', it is surely to take hundreds of MB. On my Mac, A Kaiti Hanzi font takes 70MB. Other fonts are generally tens to hundreds of KB, but the smallest Hanzi font may take several MB. The largest ones must be Hanzi fonts ( if you have installed any ). Open your systems font directory and sort by size. It’s really difficult for non-Chinese to distinguish “square shaped character” and “square shape”. In 2014, China’s President Xi visited Germany, and the locals made a banner with lots of Tofus.

#Generate webfont software#

We developers should more or less have encountered in software UIs, web pages or terminals. If the computer does not contain a glyph, it will be rendered as something like 口, called “Tofu' in wikipedia community. Generally any of them can work well, because we use only about 3500 in daily life.īut incomplete fonts do cause problems. And BIG5, an encoding used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, defines a collection of 13,000. GBK, an encoding widely used in mainland China, defines a collection of 20,000. We may use about 80,000 of them (including those in Japanese and Korean). While for Hanzi, we even don’t know exactly how many characters exists. Generally you need only one byte for any character used in an article or web page. We should admit that Hanzi is not friendly to Internet įirst of all, there is never a complete Hanzi font.Įnglish contains 26 letters. Enhance WebFonts with Auto-Subsetting: Help Hanzi Survive from Our Era Chap I.