One of the things I noticed about the process of learning to recognize characters is that seeing them in a font which I am not used to can completely throw me. This is especially true of the flowery fonts which are used in advertising.

I was thinking it would be cool and very useful if Skritter could show us examples of a character in several different fonts side by side. In mark-up that would obviously depend on the user having those fonts installed, but it occurs to me that you could generate an image file of a table showing a handful of different fonts and then cache it. That way it would only be stressful on the server the first time any character was requested.

bad idea!

@learninglife j.h. Why is it a "bad idea!"?

I don't think it's a bad idea. If you don't want to change your font you don't have to. So what's so bad about his idea?

I think when learning new characters for the first time it's very helpful to see them in varying font styles. It helps cement how strokes should or should not look into your mind, and better prepares you for encountering them in places like blogs, magazines, and shop signs.

I think it is a bad idea to change fonts in skritter.

It is like Plato's shadows in the cave. When learning a character it should be presented in a very clear way that makes understanding easy.

To clarify, I don't mean that this image would be presented as part of the main test pages. I certainly wouldn't want to change the way the main Skritter writing screen works. What I was I was envisaging is that when you are looking at the answer page, and you click on one of the characters for further information about it, it could be part of that smaller screen which the program loads up on demand. Perhaps just a little graphic in the form of a table with the character in six or eight different fonts for side-by-side comparison.

I think this would be neat, but I can't see us getting the time to build it any time soon. Is there no other website that does this?

Well I found this site which is pretty neat http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/calligraphy.html and it kind of illustrates what I mean. For example if I select the seventh font they have there in section three I can barely work out what the characters are even though I typed them in the first place!

This sort of page is interesting to visit but I wouldn't make the effort of going back there every day to compare fonts. I thought it would be neat on Skritter because I do come here almost every day and that kind of continuous exposure might eventually rub off. Not to worry if I doesn't see the light of day though, it was only an idea for a "nice to have" feature.

I've also considered this possibility--and it seems like it would be helpful-- but yeah, I'm not sure how high of a priority this should be in relation to other proposed features already on the docket.

I was thinking about another related feature. How about having the ability to write in a font designed to look like it's written with a fountain pen instead of a brush (still kaishu though)? An other feature that I would really like is the ability to practise writing xingshu, since I see it a lot and can't even understand some of the most basic characters.