Version 1.37 adds support for international languages

A few Planneriffic users have emailed me about something I never would have caught on my own. Their calendars have events in Traditional Chinese, and when they generate their planner, every event came out as a row of empty boxes.

Here's why: to render your events in the PDF, Planneriffic was using a plain Latin font. So when that font tries to render a Chinese character, you get a blank box. The typography world even has a name for it: tofu.

Planneriffic 1.37 sorts that out.

A new bundled font in version 1.37

The Planneriffic app now ships with Noto Sans. Noto is actually short for "no tofu," which is pretty much the font's entire job: get rid of the blank boxes. The new app build carries the full CJK character set, so Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean all work.

With the larger font bundle, the updated app is now a bit bigger than before, around 58mb instead of 38mb. But nothing else changes in the app, and the new font only kicks in when you have calendar events that need it.

Calendar events in Traditional Chinese rendering in Planneriffic

There's nothing to switch on. Planneriffic reads your calendar event text, notices when a character needs the new font, and reaches for it on its own. English keeps looking exactly the way it did before.

Thank you to the users who asked

Quick thank you to the users who emailed me about this. I made Planneriffic for myself first, and all my events are in English, so a gap like this is invisible to me until someone points it out.

If you have calendar events in another language and something still looks wrong, send me a note. Noto covers a huge range, but there's always some character that slips through, and I'd rather fix it than leave you with a planner you can't read.

How to get the new version

Grab the Windows or Mac version from the trial button on this site to get the latest build automatically. If you already have Planneriffic, the download links in your email always point to the newest version too. So then you can just swap out your old version for the new one.