When can support Chinese?

[林小天]

 

First of all, I think your software is very good.
But the support for Chinese is poor. I think it can be optimized.

[林小天]

Set the font panel
Can't input Chinese and will always get stuck
3 software will always look forward to the official revision and optimization

[William Overington]

I have emailed two experts and received replies.

Unfortunately there is not enough information for them to ascertain what is the problem that is being encountered.

I know very little about Chinese.

I tried a test.

I copied the poem that is on page 3 of the following document onto the clipboard.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/localizable_sentences_the_novel_chapter_034.pdf

In Microsoft Edge I searched for

translate

and got the Bing Translator

I pasted my poem into the left-side anel and chose Chinese Traditional as the target language.

I copied the result onto the clipboard.

I then used Google translate to translate back to Englsh, just to observe what a round-trip with two different machine translators would do.

The round trip is not exactly back to the original but is very close and the meaning is the same.

So, the text in Chinese still on the clipboard I pasted into a new Affinity Publisher document, with the font set as Arial at 24 point. (more about this later! not as it appears at first!)

A display is produced. It seems to be Arial.

Changing the font to Times New Roman produces a different display.

Yet upon checking, neither font seems to have Chinese characters, so it seems that the system might have substituted fonts.

So entering Chinese characters from the Glyph Browser using Arial or Times New Roman is not possible.

Investigation is continuing, but please join in.

William

 

 

 

 

 

 

[William Overington]

So I copied the purportedly Arial text onto the clipboard and pasted it into WordPad, and the text displayed in WordPad is not in the same font and is listed as SimSun in WordPad.

Repeating that with the purportedly Times New Roman text gives the same result, SimSun.

The SimSun font may well be the same font that is purportedly Times New Roman in Affinity Publisher.

Maybe the system 'knows' that Arial is sanserif and substituted a font and knows that Times New Roman is serifed and substituted a different font.

So, what is the font substituted for Arial in Affinity Publisher?

Should Affinity Publisher ideally have changed the name of the font to that which is being used? Is that possible or is it lower down in the system?

Anyway, I am posting this and then try to use SimSun in Affinity Publisher and report back.

William

 

[William Overington]

I have the following fonts, at least

SimSun which is CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) from plane 0 of Unicode.

SimSun ExtB which is from palne 2 of Unicode

NSimSun

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/simsun

William

 

[Alfred]

10 minutes ago, William Overington said:

So I copied the purportedly Arial text onto the clipboard and pasted it into WordPad, and the text displayed in WordPad is not in the same font and is listed as SimSun in WordPad.

Repeating that with the purportedly Times New Roman text gives the same result, SimSun.

 

2 minutes ago, William Overington said:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/simsun

 

As noted in the Microsoft Typography document, SimSun features a mincho (serif) stroke style. I would expect a sans-serif font such as Arial to be replaced by something like SimHei.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/simhei

[William Overington]

Now, each CJK character in Unicode has a code point.

I also seem to remember seeing somewhere sometime, nothing to do with the Unicode character map, a picture from a book of Chinese characters and below each of them was a four digit number in the style as used in English.

I cannot quite place it but it might have been something to do with sending telegrams originally and might be used when recording a name in a document, akin to how someone from the west is asked to spell his or her name.

I am wondering if the original request is something along the lines of asking for Affinity Publisher to have a panel into which one can enter such a number and at the touch of a button the character is entered into the document.

That would need the availability of an electronic file that links those code numbers to Unicode code points so that Affinity Publisher can decode the number input and then choose the appropriate Unicode character. Maybe such a file is available somewhere already. Maybe it is open source.

William

 

[William Overington]

Hello Alfred

Thank you.

I cannot find SimHei listed in my supply of fonts in Affinity Publisher and I have had a look in the Fonts directory as well.

Here is a png for what I have got displayed.

William

 

[Alfred]

2 minutes ago, William Overington said:

I cannot find SimHei listed in my supply of fonts in Affinity Publisher and I have had a look in the Fonts directory as well.

Here is a png for what I have got displayed.

That looks suspiciously like SimHei, William! It certainly isn’t SimSun.

[William Overington]

Following my suggestion two posts back, something that is not the same yet could be helpful not just for Chinese would be a facility within the Glyph Browser to enter a Unicode code point as a hexadecimal number and then click a button and the glyph is then highlighted in the glyph browser and then click another button and the character becomes inserted in the document.

This could be done such that if the person using the software highlights the glyph then clicking the second button inserts the character into the document. This would have the advantage that double clicking would not be needed.

I knew someone once who had a disability yet was able to use a computer using a piece of plastic with holes in it that fitted over the keyboard but just could not do a double click and had to ask a passer by to double click to get a program started first of all. Someone managed to get it set up so that the program had the focus at bootup so just pressing the return key was all that was needed to get started and a double click was not needed.

So keep the double click for those who want to use it but could you please also have a method so that simple click is all that is needed for inserting a character from the glyph browser.

William

 

[William Overington]

8 minutes ago, Alfred said:

That looks suspiciously like SimHei, William! It certainly isn’t SimSun.

Yes.

So why does SimHei not show up in the list of fonts? Maybe it has a different name.

William

 

[William Overington]

There appear to be some CJK fonts with names starting with Microsoft.

There is also MS Gothic.

William

 

[Alfred]

24 minutes ago, William Overington said:

There is also MS Gothic.

I think that’s what it is. Comparing samples of SimHei and MS Gothic, it looks more like the latter.

[William Overington]

Thank you.

William

 

[William Overington]

Is there a possibility that someone at Serif could comment on this topic please?

William

 

[Dave Harris]

The Glyph Browser has a search box into which you can enter Unicode values like U+0040. You can also enter glyph IDs like G+0040.

If you select Arial and then use characters that Arial doesn't define, most apps will switch to a different font to display them so you can at least see what they are. Which font that is may be different for different apps. It may also depend on which characters you used. We try to match basic font attributes, such as whether the font is monospaced or sans serif. I don't know what WordPad does.

[William Overington]

Thank you.

I have followed the instructions in the help page I think but I cannot get it to work.

The instructions do not have clear instructions about how to search once one has entered U+00b0.

I find the text on the help page far too small for convenient reading, though I can read it alright.

Also, I do not like needing to double click to enter a character into the document but that is another issue - but since you are here ...

William

 

 

 

 

[dominik]

1 hour ago, William Overington said:

I find the text on the help page far too small for convenient reading, though I can read it alright.

You can use CTRL+mouse wheel or CTRL+ '+' and CTRL+ '-' to increase and decrease the text size in help.

d.

[林小天]

Can not appear Chinese fonts, I think this one BUG, 3 software exists BUG

Only English names will appear

 

[ayan fun]

I have bought Affinity Publisher！ So great app，and I have said goodbye to Indesign. But I found a problem. When using paragraph , there is something not right. see the picture below. the comma and period come to the head of the sentences. Hope u guys can fix it soon. Thank u! 

[ayan fun]

I have to post a reply again, hoping affinity product can support Chinese typography. Thanks!

[ayan fun]

It is 2020 now. I have to post a reply again, hoping affinity products can support Chinese typography soon. Thanks!

[Tofu]

I purchased the Designer, Photo and Pubilsher Apps when they first launched. I had a high hope that I'd be able to work on a museum project in Chinese after I upgraded to the Publisher 1.10 today.

However, after opening the .idml file, the Chinese style sheets had gone. When I checked the Latin glyphs, it used the Chinese fonts instead of the Latin fonts that I had set up, and the Latin size changed too. 

After doing some Chinese and Japanese typographical rules testing, I'm afraid to say that it just doesn't work. Not yet.

I'm a professional digital typesetter who works on these three languages – Chinese, Japanese and Korean for publishers and museum – this is where you can see what I do (https://dstsai.com/chinese-typesetting.html) and what I DO NEED for the software to work. I hope that Affinity software will soon support the CJK languages.

 

Edited August 5, 2021 by Tofu
To describe better for what the publishers need from the software.