Chinese Pod Font
rlonneman63
January 19, 2012, 10:12 AM posted in General DiscussionIs there a particular font setting that I should install for using ChinesePod.com? I'm having trouble with a few characters such as 冷、直、卷. (Even here they appear incorrect. I'll explain in case it's only my computer. The leng3 looks more like 节加两点水 instead of like ling4. The “直” 有奇怪的竖在左边等). How can I avoid this? It's really misleading.
toianw
Hi John. I have exactly the same problem, but only within Firefox. Any idea what I need to do to change the font?
John
I loaded up Firefox (for Mac), and I confirm that the characters are displaying in Firefox as you describe them. I went into Preferences > Fonts > Advanced, and tried quite a few settings, but no matter what I chose, I couldn't get the ChinesePod page to display the proper font. (The English fonts would change, but the Chinese characters would not).
We're now on Chinese New Year vacation; I'm going to have to take this up with someone in our IT Department after the break (in early February). Sorry for making you both wait!
toianw
Thanks for looking into it John. Have a good holiday!
bodawei
Hi John (for when you are back from holidays ..)
Can someone give general instructions for refreshing or changing the fonts used by your laptop in the ChinesePod site? In just the past month I have developed a problem where the occasional character does not appear at all (usually left with a 口 or a box with a question mark.) I assume that this is just my computer because no-one has commented on site that characters are missing. I'm hoping I don't have to re-fresh Word 7. I am using Chrome on Windows 7 Starter when these problems arise. I have not noticed this problem outside ChinesePod. When writing in Word I have never had this problem, nor on any other website.
John
We've looked into it a bit more. It's a problem that seems to only affect Firefox, caused by the way Firefox interprets our site CSS (and the way it chooses substitute fonts as a result). We should be able to make some simple changes to the CSS and fix it. The tech team will look into that.
toianw
Sounds promising, though on further reflection it seems to me to be more of a firefox problem than a CPod problem - it's the same on every website (even the characters I type into a google search are displayed this way, for example).
Have any other Firefox users out there found a way around this?
Good luck with sorting it out on the CPod site, anyway.
John
January 20, 2012, 02:05 AMMost Chinese fonts should be OK. I did a quick test with the character 冷, and I only found one font that displayed it as you describe (it was "小塚明朝 Pro R").
I recommend 黑体 (hēitǐ) if you just want simple uniform lines (it's kind of like a Chinese Arial), or 楷体 (kǎitǐ) if you want something that's still simple, but looks a little more like handwriting. The default "Times New Roman Chinese equivalent" is 宋体 (Sòngtǐ), and I personally don't like it.