gistfile1.txt

Hi Mr. Jobs:

I would like to inform you that an erroneous font shipped with Snow Leopard is sub-Apple standard. The font afflicts many of your loyal users, particularly visual designers, web designers and people who care about typefaces, in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

My name is Lukhnos. I'm a Taiwanese Mac and iPhone software developer. I would like to congratulate on your successful release of Mac OS X Snow Leopard. For many of us, the upgrade process was smooth. We appreciate that Apple continues delivering such a high-quality, high-performance operating system that is suitable for both daily life and professional needs.

There is, however, one problem that gravely undermines such experience. It's a new font that is causing daily visual pain to many Traditional Chinese users.

Snow Leopard ships with a new set of sans serif Chinese fonts. One of them, Hei TC ("TC" for Traditional Chinese), seems to be Apple's official replacement of the long-serving LiHei Pro. I can see Apple has been spending efforts in providing a modernized font set, but Hei TC has a few bugs that make it unacceptable to be used in anything serious, including your own website.

Let me show you two samples here. Sample A is a list of Traditional Chinese characters that share the radical component "moon". When rendered in Hei TC, as the sample shows, however, the components in these characters are inconsistent.

    [Sample A in RTF email]

Sample B is how Hei TC is used in real life. It's also an example of how Hei TC makes its first impression to the general public—unfortunately, an awkward one. This is one of Apple Taiwan's web pages introducing Snow Leopard. Please note that the big caption is a picture, using the right character in a different typeface, whereas the secondary titles are in text, rendered with Hei HC, which makes some of the characters wrong.

    [Sample B in RTF email]

A friend of ours, Zonble Yang, has compiled a list at http://cocoa.zonble.net/tagged/Heiti_Tc . What's shown in this email is the most glaring and representative among the problems.

Many of us have also filed bugs to Apple. For reference, the Radar I filed is rdar://7072541 ; another filed by Zonble is rdar://7199369 . Zonble's report was filed long ago while Mac OS X 10.6 was still in developer beta (he and I work at the same company, which is an ADC Select member).

The problem with Hei TC also afflicts iPhone OS 3.0. So every iPhone sold in the world is showing the faulty Traditional Chinese characters rendered with Hei TC.

So while we have always appreciated Apple's efforts in promoting computer typography. Many of us—professional visual designers, web designers, people who work in the publishing industry, connoisseurs of typography, in short, Apple's loyal users—are appalled at the fact that Hei TC has been shipped by Apple at all.

For a company that is known for its pursuit of perfection, and in particular for a company that is known for your keen understanding of calligraphy, I believe Apple can do and should do better when it comes to the fonts it ships.

Please correct the problems in Hei TC and make it on par with Apple's high standard.

I appreciate your time in reading this and I look forward to a great solution from Apple.

Thank you!

Best regards,
Lukhnos D. Liu


[not shown in email]

Attachments:
Sample A: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/142739/HeiTCBug/SampleA-ComponentInconsistency.png
Sample B: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/142739/HeiTCBug/SampleB-AppleWebSite.jpg