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:

• tiandi.info/pyp

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.

New Typeface for Pīnyīn and Pīnyīn-English Material

After much research and consideration, I have decided to change the default typeface for the Pīnyīn and Pīnyīn-English material from Helvetica Neue/Arial to Gentium Basic. (Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, and “sans-serif” will be set as the fallback typefaces.)

Some reasons for this are:

• While Helvetica Neue, Arial, etc. would be rendered using local font files (ones residing on the client device itself), the Gentium Basic font files will be served from a web server. This will help eliminate dependence on certain font files (and certain versions of those font files) being available on users’ devices.
• Most modern web browsers now support this capability, making it workable for web users.
• With the right programming code, EPUB files can also support included font files.
• Gentium Basic’s licence allows for such usage for free, whereas the licences of Helvetica Neue, Arial, etc. do not.
• Increased certainty about what font file will be used to render certain material makes it more certain that that material will be rendered properly on users’ devices—that certain things will line up properly, etc.
• Helvetica Neue, Arial, etc. have a clean, neutral appearance that many like (Interestingly, “Helvetica” means “Swiss” in Latin.), but Gentium Basic should prove to be more readable. For example, it makes it easier to tell similar-looking characters apart from one another, such as “i”, “I”, and “l”.
• The website of Gentium Basic’s designer has information that shows that he has thought and researched deeply about the design of diacritics, which is what Pīnyīn tone marks are. Indeed, the increased size and clarity of Gentium Basic’s Pīnyīn tone marks should especially help to make Pīnyīn text easier to read.
• While Helvetica Neue, Arial, etc. can seem a little sterile, Gentium Basic has a more “artful”, yet friendly style. Hopefully this will make the Pīnyīn and Pīnyīn-English material even more appealing.

Some Pīnyīn and Pīnyīn-English material has already been converted to use the Gentium Basic typeface, and eventually more of it will be so converted.