Chawye Hsu's MacType Profile

A MacType Profile designed and maintained by Chawye Hsu.

Usage

This profile was originally designed only for 100% screen scaling, i.e. non-HiDPI. However, since it's designed for 100% screen scaling, it should work on any higher DPI, though people using HiDPI devices may give up MacType. I've used it on a 125% screen scaling nowadays.

To use this profile you'll need to install the XHei WP font family from the IoF font set:

https://bbs.themex.net/showthread.php?t=16898387

If you don't want to install the fonts and don't want to use font substitutions, then you can turn font substitutions off by setting FontSubstitutes=0. You can still apply the other settings of this profile to the system font.

In theory, the font rendering settings of this profile can be used with any other typeface. Therefore you can replace those XHeis substitutions listed in the [FontSubstitutes] section and Font variable in the [Preview] section with the typeface you want to use. (I've tested fonts other than XHei WP, see references below)

To use, simply put chawyehsu.ini into MacType's ini folder then apply it.

Screenshots

Disable	Enable

Note: They were captured under a 125% screen scaling DPI. There were also screenshots, which can be found here, captured under the standard (100%) DPI.

History

early days

Back to 2013 when I was in college, I bought hardwares and assembled my first PC myself. I decided to adopt the latest version of Windows, which is Windows 8 at that time for the machine, thus I started to look for some contents about it. I spent lots of time in playing with and learning from the Windows8吧, a reddit-like community. I learnt a lot from the subreddit, including MacType's information.

Staring from the Default.ini profile, I tried and enjoyed lots of different profiles shared by other MacType users. There was a popular profile set named XMac series used by many users. It's bundled in a font set called IoF (the full name is Impression of Font), made by MaxChow from the THEMEX forum.

mid period

Those profiles were well designed and configured for the fonts. I enjoyed it so much, especially the XHei subset. But I was not satisfied with the default configuration of those XHei profiles. I started to make my own MacType profile with limited knowledge. I chose the XHei Microsoft font subset of IoF as the font for font substitutions, because I thought it's similar to the default OS font. The name of my first MacType profile is MicrosoftMod.ini:

-rw-r--r-- 1 hanabi 197609 9.4K Dec 11  2013 MicrosoftMod.ini

It became the only profile I used for the next 3 years. My collage classmate also used it. My PC's OS was reinstalled to Windows 10 after my graduation at 2016. I installed the new version of MacType and was going to "upgrade" my profile. I grabbed the final (6th) version of IoF and extracted 3 font subset I preferred, then updated my MicrosoftMod profile to 3 different new profiles:

-rw-r--r-- 1 hanabi 197609 12K May  7  2016 Apple_Mod.ini
-rw-r--r-- 1 hanabi 197609 13K May  7  2016 Microsoft_Mod_Final.ini
-rw-r--r-- 1 hanabi 197609 13K Apr 22  2018 WP_Mod.ini

Microsoft_Mod_Final.ini is totally based on MicrosoftMod.ini, with some minor rendering tweaks for my new monitor and a change on font substitutions to fit the fonts from the 6th version of IoF. Apple_Mod.ini and WP_Mod.ini are then based on Microsoft_Mod_Final.ini, using different fonts XHei Apple and XHei WP and having compatibility tweaks for ClearType.

nowadays

After using these new profiles for serveral months, I realized that I prefer WP_Mod.ini. I was stuck in the profile for a long time util open sourcing this repository and releasing the profile. The profile was renamed to chawyehsu.ini as you can see currently. It has some extras rendering tweaks compared to the predecessor WP_Mod.ini.

typeface selection

I found the reason why I prefer XHei Microsoft and XHei WP at my old days of using MacType, after I learning some knowledge about typeface.

XHei Microsoft is a font combined 方正兰亭黑 with Segoe UI. 方正兰亭黑 is a cousin font of Microsoft Yahei(微软雅黑), they are designed by the same author, the latin script part of these two fonts are both Segoe UI. That's why it looks similar to the default font of my OS (Windows Chinese edition).

XHei WP is a font combined Hiragino Sans GB(冬青黑体) with Segoe WP. Hiragino Sans GB is included in macOS as a system bundled font since OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Although it isn't the default font of the system (Simplified Chinese edition), many websites and macOS users perfer it instead of the default 华文黑体. Hiragino Sans GB looks better in some aspects. Combining with Segoe UI's cousin font Segoe WP, XHei WP gains a Chinese script on macOS and a latin script on Windows. And it's tasty for me.

Anything else? Typeface is a interesting field to me. Therefore, I might try new fonts as time goes on, such as the HarmonyOS Sans font.

Troubleshooting

1. Emojis are grayed

This is a known issue about MacType working with browsers. You may read more about it in #3.

2. The text becomes blurry compared with the default Windows

But this is how MacType work, doesn't it? A replacement of font rendering/rasterization from a sharp but distorted way to a kinda blurry but shaped way. Anyway, that's a trade-off or more like a preference towards font rendering.

3. CJK characters become white block under Firefox family browsers

This may occur on Firefox-based browsers resulting complete unavailable to browse web pages containing CJK characters. There is a Zhihu topic discussing the same issue. The issue was discovered on Firefox 100 for the first time, later versions are also affected. A bug report has been submitted to Bugzilla, however it was closed as incompleted due to inactive.

You may try to open about:config and set security.sandbox.content.win32k-disable to false to see if it could mitigate. It is suggested discussing on the bug report page, that may help Firefox developers to fix this bug.

References

• Chromium based browsers renderer injection issue
• Titlebar rendering issue
• Workaround for Chrome 78+
• Screenshots that using this profile with HarmonyOS Sans

License

The profile is given to the Public Domain.