Apps are getting ever more flexible, and in doing so they’re also becoming increasingly complex. Gone are the days when they mostly opened files, did things to them, and saved them again. We now expect to be able to use our favourite image editor from inside the Photos app, and to share documents between multiple apps, using features as services in reusable components.

For those of us who used OpenDoc back in the 1990s this is all familiar territory. Intended as Apple’s response to Microsoft’s OLE (Object Linking and Embedding), OpenDoc broke apps down to single-task components that worked together. This was best exemplified in the suite of Internet tools provided collectively as Cyberdog for a brief period in 1996-97. Those included a web browser, FTP and email clients, and a newsreader, that could be embedded in other apps that supported OpenDoc’s Bento format.

When Steve Jobs killed OpenDoc in 1997, few could have envisaged what was to come later in app extensions, or appexes, nor how extensively they have become used by macOS. From speech synthesisers and Blu-ray encoders to wallpapers and widgets, appexes have proliferated far beyond the wildest dreams of the OpenDoc designers, but so little is known about they’re managed by macOS.

macOS Sequoia keeps extensive registries of apps and appexes. The most detailed is the grand database maintained by LaunchServices, only visible through its hidden lsregister command tool. Appexes are the preserve of the PlugInKit registry, which can be dumped using the pluginkit tool. Resource management is performed by RunningBoard and appears inaccessible, as do the activity schedules managed by Duet Activity Scheduler (DAS).

All four registries appear to be constructed afresh during startup, in the case of LaunchServices and PlugInKit by a process of discovery, something I’ll be looking at in more detail in the near future. For PlugInKit, it’s discovery that determines which appex services are offered, whether they’re generators of QuickLook thumbnails or previews, Safari extensions, or file systems such as ExFAT or MS-DOS. The latter are refugees from their former existence as kernel extensions, a route now being followed by macFuse 5.0.

Although the user has limited control over those in System Settings and, in the case of Safari extensions, in Safari’s settings, the PlugInKit registry is designed to operate automatically. If the user does try making changes using pluginkit those are likely to be undone when the registry is next updated, and in any case following reboot.

There are some differences obvious between LaunchServices’ database and PlugInKit’s registry. While LaunchServices comfortably accommodates as many versions of apps that it can find, and offers them as choices for opening documents in the Finder’s contextual menu, PlugInKit makes the user’s life simpler by only offering the latest version of each appex. Given that appexes now include replacements for QuickLook’s qlgenerators, and Spotlight importers, that’s hardly surprising, and the prospect of being offered multiple versions in the Share menu would be overwhelming for any user.

PlugInKit and appexes aren’t recent, and probably date back to OS X 10.9 Mavericks, with their NSExtension property list definitions appearing a year later in Yosemite. In macOS 13 Ventura, Apple augmented that with ExtensionKit and ExtensionFoundations both for creating extensions and the extension points offered by host apps. Appexes now cover many different domains, and have become increasingly popular in third-party products, with some like Eternal Storms’ Yoink relying on them for their tight integration with macOS.

Improving our understanding of appexes and their management by PlugInKit isn’t an academic exercise. Host apps and their extensions don’t always work in perfect harmony. Whether you’re developing either of them, or just trying to cope with their disagreements, insight can be important. Now that Sequoia requires QuickLook thumbnail and preview generation to occur in appexes rather than qlgenerators, the qlmanage command tool is of limited value, and you have to rely on PlugInKit instead.

Once upon a time, Apple used to provide extensive and well-written conceptual documentation, where it explained how Mac OS worked, so that when we came to tackle problems we could fall back on understanding. Now we’re largely left to fend for ourselves, so armed with a forthcoming new version of AppexIndexer, I’m off to discover PlugInKit discovery.

In 1907, after over twenty years of lucrative work painting portraits, John Singer Sargent closed his studio in London, and cut himself adrift to travel where and when he wanted.

The American artists Jane de Glehn and her husband Wilfrid (1870-1951) were long-standing friends. Sargent first met Wilfrid around 1895 when he was working on murals in Boston Public Library, and Wilfrid married Jane Emmet (1873-1961), sister of Lydia Field Emmet, in 1904. The Fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, Italy (1907) shows Jane working at a lightweight wooden easel in the grounds of the villa.

The composition in his Dolce Far Niente (1907) is complex, with five of the figures staggered and slightly out of line along the gentle curve of the bank crossing this unusually wide canvas, its aspect ratio being more typical of marine views and panoramas. Against this are steep diagonals in the middle of the painting, formed by the edge of the brown reflection on the water, the male in the left pair of figures, and the closest female. The cropping of the horizon and any background beyond the immediate meadow and stream gives a sense of space and recession, aided by the foreshortening of the closest figure, despite the proximity of the individuals to one another.

The painting consists of a multitude of daubs, strokes, and dabs of colour, those marks composed to provide just enough information for the viewer to assemble them into the whole, which as a result ‘pops’ out in a vivid reality.

It’s thought that all three male figures were modelled by Nicola d’Inverno, the painter’s manservant, and the woman seen asleep appears to be his friend Jane de Glehn. Sargent had purchased the costumes in the Middle East during his travels there, and they were transported in trunks to this site, believed to be the brook at Peuterey in the Val d’Aosta, most probably in the summer of 1907.

This painting was hung in the summer exhibition of the New English Art Club, London, in 1909, and was favourably received by the critics. It was sold within an hour of the opening of the press view, to Augustus Healy, founder of the Brooklyn Museum, where it has hung ever since.

Sargent’s bravura watercolour sketch of Grand Canal, Venice (1907) is composed of a sparse, even minimalist, collection of brushstrokes of watercolour assembled into a detailed view of the motif. He views Venice from the level of a gondola, the bows of which are also shown. His palette for these sketches is generally centred on earth colours for the buildings, with blue for the sky, water, and usually the shadows.

The following year, his Flotsam and Jetsam follows in the same style, with the figures of young boys in the foreground sketched in roughly to suggest movement.

Sargent was an early adopter of cadmium yellow pigment in watercolours such as Olive Trees, Corfu from 1909, where it ensured that his greens remained lightfast.

He wasn’t dependent on sophisticated techniques, though: Rio dei Mendicanti, Venice from about 1909 works its magic almost entirely using a combination of passages using wet on dry and wet on wet. There isn’t even much in the way of a graphite drawing under its thin washes.

Sargent met up with the plein air specialist Ambrogio Raffele again when he returned to the Alps during the summers of 1909 to 1911, and painted this watercolour of him as an Artist in the Simplon at some time in those years. Raffele is painting a view of the Fletschhorn, to the south-west of the Simplon Pass, using an improvised easel formed from two crossed poles.

In the summers of 1909-11, Sargent stayed with various friends in the Bellevue Hotel at the top of the Simplon Pass, enjoying the cool mountain air at a time when much of the rest of Europe would have been stiflingly hot. While his family and friends whiled away their days in leisure, Sargent got them to pose for a unique series of informal portraits. They may have been reclining at leisure, but Sargent took those watercolours very seriously, and deployed an amazing array of techniques. Among the finest is his Simplon Pass: The Tease from the summer of 1911. For any watercolour artist, it is a lexicon of advanced techniques.

One of the most unusual, used here extensively, is wax resist. Before applying paint, Sargent scribbled over areas that were intended to be vegetation, using a soft wax crayon, probably made from beeswax. On a fairly rough paper, the wax is deposited unevenly, and when painted over using watercolour it shows the white paper through. This creates disruptive patterns of near-white in the midst of the greens, and a superb effect.

Most of the paint used is transparent watercolour, applied as a wash in small areas, and in gestural marks elsewhere. In the upper third of this detail, he has applied white gouache (opaque watercolour) sufficiently thickly for it to now have fine cracks. The large pale blue area crossing the middle appears to have been rewetted and some of its colour lifted to reduce its intensity, although most of his applications of paint over existing paint have been made wet on dry.

Complex details such as the faces and hands of the figures have undergone multiple repainting, starting with the palest flesh of the face, and progressively darkening to near-black. In most cases, the clean edges of the marks demonstrate that these were applied wet on dry, with as many as six different layers in the hair.

In the midst of this complex assembly of layers, Sargent still keeps to the lines of his original graphite sketch, which he uses to give the parasol form, and maintains small reserved areas, here forming the spectacle frames in the white of the paper. He could have used wax resist here, but if using pure beeswax it’s hard to keep the soft wax to fine lines.

Sargent is the Chess Grand Master, the strategist whose moves at times might almost seem random or abstract, but in the end they all come together to bring this masterly watercolour to life.

John Singer Sargent’s move to London in 1886 had proved a commercial success, and he painted portraits of the rich and famous until he closed his studio there in 1907.

His group portrait of The Ladies Alexandra, Mary, and Theo Acheson, normally simply known as The Acheson Sisters, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1902, where it was both very popular and favourably received. And at first sight, it is indeed a delight, as they sit around the front of a huge urn decorated with floral garlands, one of the ladies reaching up to pick oranges from a tree just above the urn. Even the late Queen Victoria would, I am sure, have approved. However, there are hidden references that link back through earlier portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds to Nicolas Poussin’s previous paintings of bacchanalian orgies.

Meanwhile, the other John Singer Sargent continued his travels across Europe and beyond. A visit to Venice in 1902 brought this stunning watercolour of Rio dell Angelo, where he provides his response to the Impressionists’ question on the colour of shadows.

The same year, Sargent visited New York, where he painted this portrait of his friend and fellow artist William Merritt Chase in his fifties. He’s immaculately dressed with a carnation in his button-hole, and the tools of his art in hand.

The following year, Sargent was back in Venice to paint this watercolour of Scuola di San Rocco assembled from a virtuoso series of marks and gestural strokes of the brush.

When he broke free of his studio for the summer of 1904, Sargent travelled to the Alps for his first season of serious plein air painting there. He stayed in the Italian mountain town of Purtud, to the south-west of Mont Blanc, where there was a group of Italian artists doing the same thing. Among them was Ambrogio Raffele (1845-1928), probably the best and most experienced of the group; Sargent became particularly friendly with him, and in An Artist in His Studio (1904) shows Raffele at work in his room there.

This painting is a paradox, in that Sargent shows an accomplished plein air painter working not in front of his motif, but in his bedroom. It’s plausible that Raffele is painting a larger version of the small sketch seen at the lower left of the large canvas.

When he reached Venice, Sargent’s watercolours became even more gestural, as shown in this view of Unloading Boats in Venice (1904).

The following summer Sargent turned his attention to his fellow travellers as they crossed the Alps on their way south. He sketched his friends during their siesta, in this Group with Parasols painted in oils in about 1905.

Here they are again in watercolour, in Siesta from the same year.

A decade after her dancing career had gone into decline, and fifteen years after his first painting of her, Sargent produced a completely different portrait of La Carmencita (c 1905). Now his virtuoso brushstrokes capture her motion. His inspiration was no longer Manet, but Giovanni Boldini and his ‘swish’.

In further time out of his studio, Sargent travelled to North Africa, where he painted this Bedouin Camp in 1905-6.

This portrait of an Arab Woman from 1905-06 is another fine example of his watercolour sketching.

At times, Sargent’s brushstrokes appear so casual that it’s almost as if he was just doodling with pigment, as in the blue shadows In a Levantine Port (1905-6). But they coalesce into the image that Sargent clearly had in his mind all the way along, and pop out at the viewer.

Given that it was over three years before Apple first shipped a Mac with an internal hard disk, it’s not surprising that one of its early shareware apps was Harry Chesley’s PackIt III for compressing archives of files, in 1986. At that time, the emphasis was more on working out how to archive both forks of Mac files and how to restore them, and less on achieving efficient compression.

The following year, 16 year-old Raymond Lau, then still a high school student, developed and marketed its replacement, Stuffit, which rapidly established itself as the standard, and probably the most popular shareware utility for the Mac. From 1987 until the release of Mac OS X in 2001, Stuffit had few rivals and its .sit archives were widespread across Macs, but didn’t make it to PCs or Windows until much later.

In 1988, Aladdin Systems was formed to take over development and sales of Stuffit, and in 2004 it changed name to Allume Systems, and was bought by IMSI. The following year, Allume was bought by Smith Micro Software, Inc.

Aladdin continued a shareware version as Stuffit Classic, and launched a commercial version as Stuffit Deluxe. This line-up was later augmented with a freeware decompressor Stuffit Expander that was bundled in Mac OS X until 10.4 Tiger.

Less known today are Stuffit’s self-expanding archive apps, with built-in decompressors and the extension .sea, that enabled the few Macs without a copy of Stuffit to open them with a double-click.

Until more powerful Macs of the mid-1990s, compression was performed in software and painfully slow. One of the more popular add-in cards for expandable Macs like the Macintosh II was Sigma Designs’ DoubleUp NuBus card that compressed in real time using Salient Software’s DiskDoubler.

This is Stuffit Deluxe version 8.0.2 from 2003, the year before Aladdin was renamed Allume.

Stuffit Deluxe included support for conversion to and from BinHex encoding, used for sending binary files via email without the risk of data corruption.

DropStuff was a drag-and-drop tool or droplet for compressing files into Stuffit, Zip or Tar archives, with support for encryption, and segmentation for use where file sizes were limited.

Its Zip option also preserved resource forks.

Archives in a range of formats, including RAR, could be managed in Stuffit Archive Manager, which could even schedule automatic creation of archives.

Although Aladdin launched a Mac OS X version with a new archive format, .sitx, and support for additional compression methods beyond its own proprietary formats, Stuffit entered decline by the time it was acquired by Smith Micro. Compression requirements had changed in Mac OS X, with decreasing use of resource forks, and free availability of bundled cross-platform compression tools such as GNU Gzip.

In 2007, BetterZip supported a standard set of compression formats, including 7-Zip, but never really caught on.

This is cross-platform WinZip seen in 2015, five years after its first release for the Mac. This originated as a graphical interface for PKZIP.

Apple started including compression tools in /System/Library/CoreServices, initially with BOMArchiveHelper in Mac OS X 10.3 Jaguar, which became Archive Utility that lives on today, supporting the Compress command in the Finder’s contextual menu. This uses a modified implementation of the Zip method that preserves extended attributes, successor to the resource forks of Classic Mac OS.

For many years, Mac OS X has had access to compression at a system level, but Apple has unaccountably not opened that up to developers. In modern Macs, compression is extensively used both on disk and in memory. However, in macOS Big Sur in 2020 Apple introduced AppleArchive with its system-level support for LZ4, LZMA, zlib and a proprietary implementation of LZFSE, and those are available in a new command tool aa.

Archive Utility offers a few options, and from 2020 has included support for plain and encrypted AppleArchive format.

The arrival of Apple silicon Macs has expanded options available for compression utilities to make better use of their two core types and energy efficiency. Freeware Keka now gives the user the choice.

Legacy copies of Stuffit are still available from here.

Apple has gone to great lengths to make the transition to its new Arm-based Macs as seamless as possible. However, there are some major differences that most need to take into account before making their leap of faith from a cherished but now-ageing Intel Mac to a sleek and glitzy new M-series Mac. This article clarifies what are often points of confusion about what you can’t or shouldn’t do with a new Apple silicon Mac.

You can’t run any macOS before Monterey (or possibly Big Sur)

There are two ways to run macOS on Apple silicon Macs: natively, or in a virtual machine (VM). The oldest version of macOS your Mac can run natively is that current at the time that model was released. Models released before October 2021 can run macOS 11 Big Sur, and are the only Apple silicon Macs that can do so. Those released from October 2021 onwards can only run the version of macOS that was current at the time of their release, but can run older versions back to macOS 12 Monterey in a VM. Current models with M4 chips are even more restricted, as the earliest version they can run is macOS 15 Sequoia, although their VMs can still stretch back to Monterey if you need.

Catalina, Mojave and earlier were never released with support for Apple silicon Macs, so can’t be run on them, and will never be able to without emulating Intel processors in software, which is slow and unreliable.

A VM running on an Apple silicon Mac can’t run Big Sur, because the Virtio driver support required for virtualisation wasn’t complete then, and didn’t work until macOS 12 Monterey, although even there it offers fewer features than in Ventura. Full details are given here.

You can’t virtualise or run Intel macOS or 32-bit apps

Bundled in macOS is Rosetta 2, enabling you to run 64-bit Intel code and apps that are compatible with macOS 10.15 Catalina. Rosetta isn’t an emulation engine, but translates code from Intel to Arm instructions. However, it can’t translate 32-bit code, and it can’t translate operating systems like macOS. It does run 64-bit Intel apps amazingly quickly, though.

A VM running macOS on Apple silicon can therefore use Rosetta 2 to translate and run 64-bit Intel code in apps that are compatible with macOS 10.15 Catalina, but is subject to the same limitations as any version of macOS on Apple silicon, in that it can’t handle older or 32-bit apps. Neither can it be used on the host Mac to run a VM of any Intel version of macOS.

If you need access to older or 32-bit Intel software, then the only practical way of doing that is on an Intel Mac that’s able to run Mojave or earlier.

You can’t install Intel kernel extensions

Rosetta 2 translation can’t support the privileged level of execution required for kernel extensions, so if you need your Mac to be able to load and use kernel extensions that are only available for Intel Macs, you can’t do that on an Apple silicon Mac. The great majority of more recent kernel extensions are now available as Universal versions that can also run native on M-series chips, but if your Mac still relies on an older kernel extension that’s Intel-only, then you can’t use that on a new Mac.

You can’t boot fully from an external drive

Unlike Intel Macs, Apple silicon models can only start their boot process from their internal SSD, as that’s required to support their Secure Boot. Although Apple silicon Macs can boot from external disks, early phases of that process still rely on the internal SSD and security policies (‘LocalPolicy’) saved there. This has several consequences:

• An Apple silicon Mac can only boot from an external disk that is ‘owned’ by a user recognised by the primary system on its internal SSD. This is a valuable security measure, as without knowing login details for a suitable user of the internal SSD, it’s not possible to boot an Apple silicon Mac from an external bootable disk.
• An Apple silicon Mac can only boot from an external disk if it can at least start that process from its internal SSD, normally requiring a bootable system on the internal SSD as well. If you do intend booting your Mac from an external disk, in practice you still need to install and maintain a bootable system on its internal SSD.
• Total failure of the internal SSD results in failure to boot from external disks as well. A bootable external disk can’t ‘get you home’ in that emergency.
• Apple silicon Macs don’t really boot fully from ‘bootable’ external installer disks, although they can still be used to install macOS when necessary, and may be required when installing older versions of macOS than currently installed.

Instructions for installing macOS on an external disk so that it can boot an Apple silicon Mac are given here.

You can’t use Boot Camp

Boot Camp allows you to start up an Intel Mac as if it’s a regular PC to run Windows. As Apple silicon Macs have completely different processors and other hardware, they can’t support that option. If you want to run Windows on your Apple silicon Mac, you’ll have to do that using a virtualiser like Parallels Desktop, and currently those can only run Arm versions of Windows, although Parallels is working on an emulator that can run some Intel versions. You can already try that out.

Avoid kernel extensions

Unlike Intel Macs, Apple silicon Macs don’t allow the use of third-party kernel extensions when running in Full Security mode. Before it can have those enabled, its startup security has to be reduced, and their use explicitly set in Startup Security Utility in Recovery mode. For most users that’s a significant deterrent. In almost all cases now, traditional kernel extensions should be replaced by new-style system extensions. You can read more about that here.

Avoid ‘cloning’ boot volume groups

Before Catalina and Big Sur divided the boot volume into a group of volumes, including System and Data, it was popular to make identical copies of, or ‘clone’, the volume containing the system. This is even more complex with Apple silicon Macs because of the multiple containers on their internal SSD. Although apps like SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner can still create clones, they can’t include the whole of the internal SSD. That limits their usefulness, and they can readily fail.

The only way you can completely replace the contents of the internal SSD of an Apple silicon Mac is to restore it from an IPSW image file when the Mac is in DFU mode. That erases the SSD so that its Data volume then has to be restored from a backup or copy, not a task to be undertaken lightly or in a hurry. This is explored in detail here.

Don’t try using startup key combinations

Entering Recovery mode and accessing features that are controlled using startup key combinations on Intel Macs is completely different in Apple silicon Macs, and controlled using the Power button. Holding keys during startup does nothing for an Apple silicon Mac. I have an illustrated guide, details on Fallback Recovery, and on troubleshooting.

Neither can you reset the PMC or NVRAM using startup keys. The PMC in an Apple silicon Mac is completely different, and shouldn’t need to be reset. If it does, then restarting should suffice. NVRAM is primarily for the use of macOS not the user, and you should never have to reset it. Further information is given here.

Further reading

My page listing articles specific to Apple silicon Macs contains extensive information and guidance.

偶然发现，思源字体的繁体字库文件，无法显示一些简体字。而思源的简体文件，似乎可以显示全部的繁体字？于是把常用的字体文件拆开，看看分别都能涵盖多少简繁汉字。

直接说结论：

• 简体字的字体，如「思源简体」，包含了中国大陆 GB18030-2000 编码标准的全部汉字，是能够同时显示几乎所有的常用繁体字的，因为这个 GB18030 标准，也涵盖了所有的早期台湾 big5 编码的繁体字；
• 反之，通常专门的「繁體 / 正體」字体，如「思源繁體」，很多简体字是不能显示的。因为相关的台湾汉字编码 CNS11643-1986（第 1 & 2 版面），只能覆盖 70% 的常用简体字。

首先，在最常用的几个字体中，

• 微软雅黑 和 思源简体 基本一致
• 思源繁体 和 思源香港 基本一致

两两之间的差别，只是少许生僻字、异体字、以及历史遗留的制作中文编码时的重复或疏忽。具体差别的内容，放在文末了。所以，这里主要对比「思源简体」和「思源繁体」，就可以了。

在思源字体 CJK 的说明文件里，写出了不同国家字体文件的字符数量，和需要支持的标准。可以看到，简中字体文件打包的字符，比繁中多了一万多个（这里的 Glyphs 不仅是中文，也包括西文、特殊符号、甚至一些 emoji）。

简中字体需要支持的标准，主要是

• 大陆 2000 年颁布的《GB18030 标准简体中文字符集》，包含 27,533 个汉字。当然，是否能做到 100% 符合，思源的设计方也表示，编码标准比较复杂，不好说……
• 2013 年颁布的《通用规范汉字表》，包含 8105 个汉字。其中有 199 个，不在 GB18030 的范围内。

繁体字体需要支持的标准，主要包括

• 台湾 1986 年颁布的《CNS11643 通用汉字标准交换码》，包括 13051 个汉字，和早年的「big5 大五码」相同。最初只有 1 2 两个字面（Panel），后来逐渐扩展，现在 1~7 字面都已经被 ISO 纳入 Unicode 体系，但思源繁体里，只支持 1 2 字面。
• 《HKSCS 香港增补字符集》，是香港从 1995 年开始，对台湾 big5 编码的补充，到 2016 年，收录汉字 5033 个。

从台湾的官网上，可以下载到目前最新的 CNS11643 – Unicode 之间的对应情况；大陆这边没有找到类似的官网资料，搜到的几个 GB18030 – Unicode 编码表，都是 PDF 格式（掀桌……）。但可以在 python 里把字符 encode，得到相应的编码，也可以变相确认，某个字符是否在某个编码里。

>>> print('劍'.encode('gb18030'))
b'\x84\xa6'
>>> print('劍'.encode('gb2312'))
报错
>>> print('劍'.encode('big5'))
b'\xbcC'
>>> print('劍'.encode('raw_unicode_escape'))
b'\\u528d'

实测结果，所有的 13053 个繁体 big5 汉字，也就是台湾最初规定的，最常用的繁体字，都包含在大陆的 GB18030 编码，也包含在思源简体的字体文件里。包含在思源繁体，而不在思源简体中的汉字，只有 1711 个（详见文末，——如果你觉得其中哪个字不够生僻，那么通常是历史遗留下来的编码重复、或者异体字。譬如，现在 Unicode 里，至少有 10 个各种形态的「龟」字了。

• 简体「龟」 – U+9F9F、U+2EF2、U+2EF3
• 繁体「龜」 – U+9F9C、U+2EF1、U+2FD4、U+F907、U+F908、U+FACE
• 日文「亀」 – U+4E80
• 还有 emoji 的 U+1F422 、埃及象形文的 𓆉 U+13189

相对的，包含在思源简体，而不在思源繁体中的汉字，有 11856 个之多。这其中，包括了非常多的常用简体字。以大陆最常用的 6763 个汉字（也就是 1980 年大陆发布的 GB2132 汉字编码集）为例。在这些汉字当中：

• 包含在 1986 年台湾 big5 编码中的汉字：4383 个
• 没有被 big5 收录，但是包含在「思源繁体」中的：482 个
• 「思源繁体」中也不存在的：1898 个

具体字符清单见文末。可以看到，思源繁体字库中，不能显示的常用简体字，接近 30%，尤其是部首本身就有简繁体之分的，如：讠纟艹饣钅车马鱼鸟页……使用了这些简体字部首的字，有很大概率，在繁体字库里无法显示。

当然，这样的差异，不一定代表着台湾那边的汉字编码工作不力、或者对简体字的傲慢。无论是 GB18030 还是 CNS11643，都早已有了更新更全面的版本，在 CNS11643 2004 年的版本中，包含了 GB2312 的全部 6763 个汉字，而整个思源简体的三万多字符，也只有 500 多个不在其中。所以，还是一些神秘的历史差异，导致——

• 简体字体支持大陆 2000 年的标准，而
• 繁体字体只支持台湾 1986 年的标准

但目前我们在网上浏览，或者文字排版时，如果用统一的字体，且需要考虑简繁体的兼容性的话，还是使用满足 GB18030 的 “简体” 字库吧。

思源字体（黑体和宋体）在 github 上的原始下载版本，分成了

• Variable OTCs – 五个地区的合集（中国、台湾、香港、日本、韩国）
• Language-specific Variable Fonts – 不同语言的合集
• Region-specific Subset Variable Fonts – 适配不同地区的版本

本文之前分析的，都是 Region-specific 版本之间的区别。而更大一级的 Language-specific 的中文字体，无论是简体繁体，都收录了四万多个字符，大约是大陆和台湾编码标准的合集，甚至更多，推荐大家去使用这个。但 Github 的界面流程，对于非专业人士来说，还是过于复杂了。而 Google Fonts 上提供的下载版本，就只有 Region-specific 的版本。

附——

欢迎收听荒野楼阁 WildloG，这里是设计师苏志斌的个人播客。作为第 0 期，我会与你分享一下做这个播客的动机、这个播客的主题会是什么、起这个名字的缘由、本期封面和播客 Logo 的设计想法，以及后续的节目计划。

在这一期，你会听到：

—- 我是谁？从我家的动物园，工作和话剧的经历，聊到我二十多年的写作习惯。

—- 我对于视频内容的态度？为什么那么久没更新《设以观复》系列？

—- 原本并不想做播客，为什么转变想法呢？动机是什么？

—- 这个播客的主题：一个外星人

—- 荒野楼阁 WildloG 这个名字是什么意思？因为生机勃勃啊！

—- Why not 和 WildloG

—- 封面设计：隐秘的荒野和兔子王国

—- 以两类节目为主：一个人捡树枝，两人以上一起捡树枝

—- 要停更视频？

｜登场人物｜

苏志斌：工业设计师，车联网智能硬件产品经理/联创，《设以观复》作者

｜相关链接｜

若你所使用的播客客户端未能完整显示插图，或遇网络问题未能正常播放，请访问：

荒野楼阁 WildloG 的地址：https://suithink.me/zlink/podcast/

阅读设计相关的各类文章：https://suithink.me/zlink/idea/

｜其他社交网络媒体｜

苏志斌 @ 知乎｜SUiTHiNK @ 即刻 / 微博

苏志斌SUiTHiNK @ Bilibili / YouTube / 小红书

｜联络邮箱｜

suithink.su@gmail.com

欢迎在 小宇宙、Spotify、YouTube、Apple Podcast 收听本节目，期待你的留言。