This topic contains 24 replies, has 8 voices, and was last updated by 
-
Posts
-
Hey guys, not sure if anyone else has this issue but it appears the radicals desk in Anki shows volcano and fins as the same but I think its a font problem, I tried pasting straight off of the Radicals page and it still shows the same (no top line). Anyone else experiencing this or have a fix?
You’re talking about the two-stroke radicals deck, right? I opened it up in OS X and Ubuntu and wasn’t able to replicate the problem. What operating system are you using? And do those radicals show up normally on say, the radical pages on TextFugu?
I’d say it’s a font thing. Not every font has the cross-bar on the top of the “volcano” radical (which I’m pretty sure is the number eight, 八) – you certainly don’t do the crossbar in normal handwriting.
Yup, I just noticed the same issue as well. Looks totally fine on the textfugu site
Using Windows 7
-
This reply was modified 12 years, 9 months ago by
Dre2Dee2.
Yep on the radicals two stroke, fins and volcano look the same on Windows 7 and Android (AnkiDroid). If the top is missing in writing then how do you tell the difference?
Context. It’s the same as telling the difference between 人 and 入 in fonts that don’t have the little tail at the top. It does help that the “fish legs” is not a kanji in its own right (unlike the “volcano” which, as I said before, is the number eight). To tell them apart as radicals, the “volcano” usually appears at the top of characters, while “fish legs” usually appears at the bottom.
Yeah, but what do you do when it’s nothing but a single character flash card? There is no context O.O
Guess. It’s fifty-fifty either way. For that matter, since it’s self-graded, just guess both and mark as you see fit. Most radical lists I’ve seen don’t even bother to differentiate between them. Frankly, it’s not important which is which, so long as you can recognise it when it appears in a character.
This is because on Windows, the default font that is chosen for Anki is the “Arial” font. Arial doesn’t show the bar on top of the 八 kanji. To display everything properly, I’d suggest switching the font to Meiryo.
Pretty sure the Windows default for Japanese is called MS Mincho. Arial, so far as I know, doesn’t have Japanese characters at all.
Is this a font issue that we can resolve on our end, or is this something that each person has to set up on his own?
Well, you can set a font using Edit -> Card Layout in Anki, but that’ll only work if they have the font on their computer already – of course, you can also add a note saying “please download this font if it’s not displaying correctly”. Looking through the list of fonts I’ve got installed, it seems the only Japanese fonts I have are MS Gothic and MS Mincho. And also MS PGothic, MS PMincho and MS UI Gothic, though other than UI Gothic (which seems to be a half-width font), I can’t really spot the difference. My Anki is using MS PMincho, incidentally, so I wasn’t entirely correct earlier.
I said the default font for Anki was Arial. At least it is for me, and I’m on Windows 7. Meiryo is included in Vista and 7 as the new default Japanese font (it replaces MS Gothic as the default). Though, why Arial is set as the default font in Anki, I’m unsure of.
I took screenshots of the 八 kanji using the different fonts found on Windows that I know support Japanese font characters, you can see them here:
MS Mincho
MS PMincho
MS Gothic
MeiryoI’m new to Anki, but maybe when you create the Anki decks, you can use a font that displays the characters correctly that users on both macs and windows can install and use (as Joel said)?
Thanks guys, with your help I was able to get this fixed.
I don’t see anything that needs correcting here. Different Japanese fonts just display the character slightly differently, neither way is right or wrong.
Just put a note on the textfugu page for はち to explain the difference with some fonts. I don’t know why it would ever be an issue though.
-
This reply was modified 12 years, 9 months ago by
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.