Updated Font Files for Pīnyīn Plus Resources
Back in 2014, the post “New Typeface for Pīnyīn and Pīnyīn-English Material” on this blog discussed the adoption of the typeface Gentium Basic for the Pīnyīn and Pīnyīn-English material that existed at the time.
As explained on the Gentium website, Gentium Plus is an expanded version of Gentium Basic. It seems that Gentium Plus will be the focus of future development work for the Gentium typeface family. Recently, a new version of Gentium Plus was released, and this has now been adopted on all existing Pīnyīn Plus resources. As a reminder, the short link listing all existing Pīnyīn Plus resources is:
Besides benefiting from design improvements, Gentium Plus is also available in the WOFF2 format, which uses advanced compression to reduce font file sizes, resulting in the font files downloading faster. To further improve download speeds, the Gentium Plus font files now used in the Pīnyīn Plus resources have also undergone font subsetting, which involves removing information for glyphs (characters of symbols) and/or font features that are not required. The resulting subsetted WOFF2 Gentium Plus font files weigh in at only about 131 KB in total, meaning that they can be downloaded in about 20% of the time required for the modified Gentium Basic font files (about 667 KB) that the current Gentium Plus files replaced, and in about 13% of the time required for the original Gentium Basic font files (about 1 MB).
While users with relatively new devices and fast Internet connections may not notice much of a difference, users with older devices and/or relatively slow Internet connections should especially benefit from the Pīnyīn Plus web pages downloading and rendering more quickly. This especially applies when these pages are loaded for the first time, before web browser file caching can take effect.
