Zev Handel's TimesPinyin Font

TimesPinyin is a TrueType font, based on Times, designed for typing Chinese in the pinyin romanization system. You can download it using the links at the bottom of the page.

It is a pre-Unicode font developed originally for Macintosh OS 8, but also works with all later versions of the Mac OS. It is no longer maintained or supported.


NEW: A keyboard layout that mimics the TimesPinyin keystrokes, for use with Unicode fonts in Mac OS X.3 and higher, is now available. All users with OS X.3 or higher are urged to use this keyboard layout instead of the deprecated TimesPinyin font.


TimesPinyin font examples:

Features:

Implementation:

Since Times already contains vowels with acute and grave accents (e.g. é, è), these may serve unmodified for second and fourth tone, respectively. The umlauted vowels of Times (e.g. ë) are modified so that they can serve for first tone. The circumflex vowels (e.g. ê) are modified so that they can serve for third tone.

The general rule for keystrokes is therefore quite simple:

The same modifications have been made to the upper case vowels A, E, and O (which are the only vowels with which a syllable may begin in pinyin orthography.)

The capital-U series has been adapted to represent toned versions of the vowel ü, and the capital-I series for the exclamatory vowel ê. Untoned ü and ê are included in the font as well. It is thus possible to construct every possible pinyin syllable, with or without initial capitalization, in any of the four tones or without a tone mark.

System Requirements:

The font was created some years ago for Macintosh OS 8. It works fine in OS 9 and OS X.

Additional Resources:

An excellent resource on pinyin fonts for both Windows and Mac platforms is Konrad Mitchell Lawson's Fool's Workshop Pinyin Fonts Online page.



If you have trouble dowloading these files, please let me know at the email address below.

Download the TimesPinyin font suitcase (331K) version 1.0 for Macintosh. The font can be installed in the OS 9 or OS X Fonts folder.

Download the TimesPinyin Read Me file, a pdf document. It contains a more detailed description of the font.



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This page last modified January 13, 2008.

Zev Handel / zev_web#namkung.com