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 It is no longer maintained or supported.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:

• All tone-marked vowels are a single character rather than being composed of a diacritic superimposed on a plain character. This ensures a clean-looking, well-spaced font, and reduces the number of keystrokes needed for character entry.
• The font sorts properly under ordinary Macintosh English sorting rules. That is, the tone-marked versions of each vowel sort with their plain vowel counterparts. This is especially useful when searching or sorting in applications like FileMaker Pro.
• If text in the TimesPinyin font is viewed on a system lacking the font, the text will still be readable, although some of the tone marks will not appear properly.
• The keystrokes are easy to remember because the font differs from ordinary Times in a logical and consistent fashion.
• The font is nearly identical to Times. TimesPinyin can therefore be used as an ordinary English font. This is useful in environments which are limited to a single font, or when frequent changes of font are impractical.
• The font contains roman, italic, bold, and bold italic faces.

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:

• First tone: option-u + vowel
• Second tone: option-e + vowel
• Third tone: option-i + vowel
• Fourth tone: option-` + vowel

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.

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.

This page last modified January 13, 2008.