The lastest beta of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard uses Heiti TC (黑體-繁) system font for Traditional Chinese. Heiti TC is available on Leopard although the system font of Leopard is Lihei Pro. This font looks really bad, and the bad font could ruin Mac OS X’s user experience no matter how advance Snow Leopard is!
Comparing to the previous system fonts such as Lihei Pro and so on, the glyph of each character of Heiti TC is smaller and placed on a lower baseline.
It results, if you switch the locale of your Mac to Traditional Chinese, you may see the Chinese text is placed too low on the menu bar, the text is too close to the bottom of the menu bar and the space on the top is too large. It makes users feel bad since it lacks the aesthetic of balance.
Another problem is the Chinese comma (， Unicode U+FF0C). Unlike the Simplified Chinese, the Traditional Chinese punctuation marks should be placed on the vertical center but not on the baseline, but Heiti TC places it on the baseline. Therefore, when using such a font to create a document, people will find the document not well formatted and not professional.
Furthermore, the positions of Heiti TC’s punctuation marks are all not consistent. The Chinese Comma is placed on the baseline, and the Chinese Stop is placed on the vertical center. I do not know anyone who use this font although it is available on Leopard, the reason might be that any native Chinese speaker would consider this font is useful.
Apple, as a Mac user, I request you. If you cannot alter the ugly part of the font before the release of Snow Leopard, please keep using Lihei Pro. I can bear that Mac OS X has bugs, but I cannot bear a terrible font!
If you are a Chinese Mac user, and you know some guys working at Apple, please write to them to let them know this issue. Or, you can tell Apple by filing tickets on Open Radar or Apple Bug Reporter website.
Chinese version of the text:
