Many find that there are overwhelmingly large amount of Chinese, Japanese, Korean (CJK) truetype fonts in the market designed only for PC. A lot of those fonts do not have multiplatform character mapping support and therefore can not be converted to Mac font. For people in Mainland China or Singapore where GB coded Chinese is official, they often find most of the available truetype Chinese fonts are in big5 encoding. For people in Japanese where Shift-JIS encoding is official in both MS-DOS, Windows and Mac, there is no net-savvy EUC encoding font support. A key to solve these problems is here now.
1) What is it?
TrueKeys is a Chinese, Japanese, Korean (CJK) 2-byte truetype font conversion utilities. What makes it different from other truetype conversion such as TTConvert 1.5 and TrueConvert 0.3b is that it generates its own cmap table for specified language encoding, and dissembles the original font to assemble the original glyph data into a new truetype. This strategy corrects
some common PC font problems such as no Mac cmap table support, etc. When TTConvert or TrueConvert does not work for your font, you should seriously try TrueKeys.
2) Who should use it?
a) Printing shop where a collect of various truetype CJK fonts is necessary. The ability to convert any market available PC truetype into a decent Mac truetype font is definitely a must.
b) Individuals who purchased PC format CJK truetype and found it unable to get converted into Mac format by TTConvert or TrueConvert. TrueKeys will be a key to your font treasure.
c) Anyone which would like to assemble a home made Chinese language kit with net resource will need TrueKeys to convert Big5 coded truetype font into GB coded truetype font. Since Big5 coded NTU series truetype font is free, one can assemble the GB part of the CLK and enable your Mac to read GB Chinese on the net.
d) Anyone which requires a EUC coded Japanese instead of the commonly used Shift-JIS coded Japanese.
3) Why should one register?
The unregistered copy runs in demo mode. It can only generate first 1000 glyphs in the specified language encoding. Registered user will have the full access to the font conversion utilities. The registration fee is $25.
4) Copyright?
The copyright of the converted font belongs to the original font designer. Please observe copyright of the converted font, do not distribute or upload the converted font to others or online service. In another word, all the converted fonts are for registered user's use only.
5) System requirement:
Any mac with system 7+, and 8MB RAM required. The TrueKeys will need
1.3 times font size allocated to it for font rendering. For system where RAM is limited, please use virtual memory. For best performance, a PowerMac with system7.5/16MB RAM or above is recommended. TrueKeys is a FAT binaries distribution,i.e., it contains both 68K and PPC native codes to run on both type CPU.
6) Supported TrueType Format:
Currently, TrueKeys fully supports TrueType v1.0. For TrueType GX (used in Quickdraw GX) or TrueType Open (used in Windows95) fonts, the support is not complete yet. Support for these new technologies will be rolled into future release of TrueKeys as they become popular and common in commercial font release. (Note, for example, the GX font in JLK can not be converted into EUC or Shift-JIS coded new font.) If you have a CJK TrueType font designed for Windows95, this software may or maynot work. User should send me the font for analysis in case that TrueKeys does not work.
7) Supported Language Encoding:
GB2312-1980
Big5
Big5 -> GB
Shift-JIS
EUC-J
Shift-JIS <-> EUC-J
Wansung
8) Technical support:
Technical support is provided only for registered users. If you find that a font can not be rendered by TrueKey, please send the problematic font and the log file "TrueKeys.log" to me for further analysis. My e-mail is xlz@chem.lsa.umich.edu.
