Chinese text….

[Bill Dewison]

I think you need the actual font file for the Chinese lettering Nigel. Once you have that, you can just type it into Corel/Illustrator and convert to curves I think.

Cheers, Dewi

[Jill Marie Welsh]

I think so too.
I think you need to have the actual font.
And make sure that the guy proof reads it before you cut it!
….you don’t want it to say the wrong words.
Nice new picture!
Love…..Jill 😉

[Nigel Fraser]

….hmmm, I dont think it’s that easy – I used to think that too until today! It seems that the chinese characters(of which there are several thousand) are made up of “base” shapes with little twiddly bits added to change the meaning. i.e you might have a shape which represents a house and when you want to write “wife” you use this symbol plus another one which represents “woman” if you see what i mean. In other words there is no chinese equivalent for the individual letters of our alphabet so I don’t think you can “type” in a font as such.
Could be wrong but it’s looking more complex than I’d hoped for – I’ve managed to get it to appear on my friends pc which has XP on by installing east asian text support (200mb or so!) But I can only view it in Word so far and cant get it into illustrator or coreldraw 🙄

If anyone else has any ideas please let me know because I’m really not looking forward to tracing it all from a scanned printout !!

Nigel

[Nicola McIntosh]

nigel

could you not print it out from word then scan it, then tidy-up? from your friends pc? 😀

Nik

[Keith Nilsen]

Hello Nigel,

This is an easy option, although it look slightly complicated….
1. Open the Word file and zoom as large as you can get it whilst keeping all the text on the screen.
2. Do a screen grab.
3. Open Photoshop and paste that screen grab into a new page.
4. Select the presumably black text (shapes) with the Magic Wand Tool.
5. Create a Workpath from the selection.
6. Export those paths to Illustrator.
7. Viola! You have all the text as an Illustrator file that you can then use as normal!

Hope this helps….

[Nigel Fraser]

Thanks for the replies – I’ve just managed to download a new unicode font for my win98se which has now enabled me to view it on my pc in word at least ! But still getting it from there to Corel/Illustrator seems to be proving difficult.
I think I will have to go with your last suggestions – although Word will only let me zoom in to 500% and the characters are pretty small and pixeled looking at that size 😥 sometimes wonder why I say yes to these jobs !

thanks anyway, Nigel

[Webeasel]

what you need to do….

IF THE FONT is TRUETYPE or VECTOR – no good if it is bitmap

Install a postscript printer driver, say a linotronic 300

set it to print to file

print the document from word to this printer and it should ask you what filename you want to call the output

rename this to a *.ps or * .prn file

import this as INTERPRETED postscript into Corel

[Robert Lambie]

thanks for the help here webeasel and thank you for loading your avatar image too.. makes all the difference to posts mate. cheers 😉

[Rodney Gold]

I do a lot of chinese text on my lasers etc- I just scan and trace.
I would digitally print the text as well , rather than go thru hoops to cut it.

[Nigel Fraser]

:dance1: CRACKED IT :dance1:

Thanks for all the help guys – I downloaded a unicode font called bitstream cyberbit (12mb for a font file!!) which contains about 65000 characters. If anyone is remotely interested you can find it here ftp://ftp.netscape.com/pub/communicator … s/windows/
Then opened the file in Word and copy and pasted the chinese parts into CorelDraw12 which supports unicode. Then its just a case of welding the parts of the characters together and job done !
I had to borrow someone elses computer to install Corel12 because my win98 wont let you install it but it’s easy to just save it down to version 10 once you’ve got that far 😀
I can’t help sticking to my “if a jobs worth doing…” moto even if it takes me hours of messing about – gives a great sense of satisfaction in the end !
thanks again, Nigel

[Eric North]

I have downloaded the fonts. will try using it next time I am working with chinese.
for those who upgraded win 2000 or xp recently and found that legacy fonts were now unusable the fix is to download fontdoctor at http://www.morrisonsoftdesign.com/. costs money but the beta test upgrade to this software that I have will fix this problem that microsoft have quietly written into the upgrade. wait for the ver 1.5 to be available though I think upgrade from 1.1 will be free. not sure though.

eric

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If you can find a path with no obstacles it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.