Ruby Font Recommendation

[Nello Lucchesi]

I want to give a ruby font (pinyin and hanzi) as a gift and I'm
looking for recommendations.

Ideally, the font includes both traditional and simplified characters
and can be installed on both Mac OS X 10.5 and Windows XP or later.

I read the comments on Chinese Mac:

http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac/pages/romanization.html#hanzi

But, what I'm looking for is a recommendation from someone who as used
a ruby font.

Thank you in advance for your input.

[Nello Lucchesi]

I'm considering buying this set of TrueType fonts for use with Word
for Mac 2008:

http://store.penpowerchinese.com/asdytr28.html

I've emailed the vendor about using these fonts on my Mac but they
replied that the font is for Windows only and there is no guarantee
that they will work on my Mac running Leopard (10.5.7)

I thought that TrueType fonts are cross-platform, running on both
Windows and Mac.

Can anyone give me some insight on why a TrueType font would work on
Windows but not Mac? Any ideas how I could figure out if they work
with Word for Mac 2008 without buying the font?

Thank you.

- nello

[TenThousandThings]

Nello,

The vendor is being overly cautious -- support for the standard
Windows implementation of TrueType (which was created by Apple) has
been in place since Panther. Support for the non-standard aspects of
Microsoft's implementation have been in place since Leopard.

I've owned the Dynafont 28 set since Panther -- trust me, the fonts
themselves work fine in Mac OS X. What doesn't work, obviously, is the
setup.exe installer program. So I guess that's what they mean when
they say the CD doesn't run on Mac OS X. But the fonts are just
sitting there in folders. There's even a folder with html that lists
all the fonts on the CD, which I've put here:

http://homepage.mac.com/chinesemac/FontListPage/home.html

This will show you the two pinyin + hanzi fonts in question. The Big
Five font (actually six fonts) is great -- all lowercase pinyin with
the Kai face. A perfect choice. Unfortunately, the choice made for the
pinyin in the GB pinyin + hanzi font was a poor one.

If you plan to do any page layout in Chinese or anything that requires
fonts in multiple weights, then you'll need one of the more
comprehensive CDs. Don't waste your money on this if you're just going
to end up buying a more comprehensive set:

http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac/pages/fonts.html#foundries

Eric