Last Resort Font 1

This post is preceded by Pinyin Font 1.

I've found characters interesting for as long as I can remember. They're just pictures, but they mean something. That's all well and good but problems start as soon as one tries to look at a different character set. Take "汉语" for example. According to Google Translate it means "Chinese" but what are the chances you could remember that if someone asked you later; probably not good unless you already new the characters.

Fortunately, there exists an official Romanization for Chinese - Pinyin. The previous quote can be written as "Hànyǔ" which, for Latin alphabet users, is a lot easier to remember. Unfortunately, unless your text viewer converts it for you, you're a bit stuck. However, almost all text viewers support different fonts so I've created a font to do the conversion instead. To be specific, it uses the Unicode Character Database (specifically Unihan.zip) to generate a complete mapping for Mandarin Pinyin.

Here's the result:

漢語，又称华语（东南亚）、中國語（日本、韩国等），其他名稱有汉文（通常指文言文）、 中文、华文、唐文、唐話、中國話等，是属汉藏语系的分析语，具有声调。汉语的文字系统——汉字是一种意音语言， 表意的同時也具一定的表音功能。 – 汉语

If you look at the source for this page you'll see that, from a Unicode point of view, the excerpt above is written in Chinese characters. Try selecting parts of the text and you'll see that only chunks can be selected.

You can download LRF1 here (it's a derivative of ChicagoFLF).