Problems When Changing Pictographic Language Fonts

Elsewhere on these pages we've extolled UNICODE as a way to uniquely assign a number to every known character or symbol — including pictographic languages like Chinese.  So it should be a snap to change Chinese text from one font to another.

In practice it's not simple or straight forward.  For one thing I don't think any one font has every single character or symbol used by all the known languages.  Instead, fonts tend to be particularly well suited to one language or group of languages, but characters for other languages are either missing or incomplete.

This caution applies to fonts known to contain most, if not all, characters for a particular pictographic language.  Two fonts generally regarded as suitable and competent for Chinese are SimSun and FZBaoSong-Z13S.  Yet, you may expect incomplete conversion between even these well regarded fonts.

To illustrate this problem, we started our with the following text in an Excel™ spreadsheet.  It was originally in the SimSun font so we asked Excel to convert it to FZBaoSong-Z13S as displayed below:

We then copied the contents of the second cell in column "D" to the clipboard and pasted it into a Microsoft Word® document and a Microsoft WordPad® document.

Pasting the Excel text into Word document caused the first two symbols to revert back to the original SimSum font (cursor position shown in red):

But, surprisingly the remaining symbols were in the desired FZBaoSong-Z13S font:

Pasting the same Excel text into WordPad caused all the symbols to revert to the original SimSun:

I have no idea why some characters reverted and others did not.  But suffice it to say, one must be cautious when changing fonts that include pictographic symbols.  We notice no such problems with non-pictographic fonts like English or Cyrillic.

AutoCaption, WordPad and quite possibly Word all rely on the same Windows® Rich Text services.  So when the Excel text in our example was imported into AutoCaption, the text reverted to SimSun.