Perpetual Chinese Calendar

LunarCal  User's Guide

LunarCal Font

LunarCal now allows you to select your favorite font for display. Although you may have lost of fonts installed, not all of them supports Chinese characters. LunarCal can only use TrueType Unicode or OpenType Unicode fonts that supports Chinese characters. All other fonts are ignored.

In addition, LunarCal is unable to verify the "correctness" of your fonts. There are a number of problems with many fonts. Many fonts are actually fixed width characters but they tell Windows that they are proportional. That is acceptable as long as you do not mix that default character set with ANSI characters.

However, the more serious of these problems are:

- missing characters
- incorrect glyph
- incorrect stroke

LunarCal now uses pinyin characters without tones so that better compatibility can be achieved with more fonts. So now, fonts that does not have diacritic characters can also be used with LunarCal. However, there are still some fonts that exhibit "strange behavior". These fonts disguises themselves as proportional fonts when they are truly bitmap or fixed width fonts and thus will cause unsightly displays on LunarCal. This cannot be avoided - you have to use another font.

You can tell the suitability of the font for use with LunarCal by viewing the sample display at the bottom of the Option screen below the font selection. If the fonts have missing characters or are strangely spaced then it will not look good on LunarCal.

This is an example of missing character glyphs:

The Bitstream CyberCJK typeface is not suitable for use with LunarCal. The words "Dông Zhì" have missing ciacritic characters. Although this fixed now (by not useing diacritic characters) the spacing is still weird.

 The CERG Chinese Font looks good:

Microsoft's YaHei font is very pretty and it also supports "ClearType" which makes the font very good on both LCD and CRT screens.

This is YaHei rendered in ClearType mode:

This is YaHei rendered in non-ClearTpe mode:

To make your PC display fonts in ClearType mode do this:

Right click at empty are of your screen->Properties->Appearance->Effects->Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts->ClearType->OK->Apply->OK.

Thats it! Now you have a better screen display.

You can now download a copy from MS site - search for "Vista Font" or "VistaFont_CHS.EXE" and "VistaFont_CHT.exe". For LunarCal you only need VistaFont_CHS.EXE as LunarCal uses the Simplified Chinese font.

Microsoft Sans Serif is also a beautiful font:

I suspect that Microsoft Sans Serif font is the replacement for Arial Unicode MS font.

There are also many Unicode TrueType and OpenType fonts available for download. Some interesting fonts are shown below:

Not all fonts are created equal. Different font have different default character sizes. LunarCal allows you to change the font size to make it more readable. The "AR PL Ukai TW" font (free) requires size 12 to be readable.

Of all the fonts, Microsoft's YaHei looks best. Previously Arial Unicode MS and Microsoft Sans Serif were my favorites, but it has a habit of rendering in heavy strokes at size 11 making the display large and cumbersome. The font sort of stares at you!

Below are a list of sites that you can download Chinese Simplified & Traditional fonts and use for free. LunarCal uses the simplified character set (except for a few characters when the traditional typeface is more appropriate).

LunarCal is unable to use any of the fonts from your older Chinese Word Processing software as they use proprietary character/glyph encoding. If you select such fonts, incorrect characters will be displayed. LunarCal only uses Unicode standard encoding.

Below are all Unicode based fonts.