BM Generator for Simplified Chinese

Question

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this (maybe language exchange is worth a shot too?) but I figured I'd give it a go in case somebody knows.

I'm using Bitmap font generator to generate a Simplified Chinese bitmap font. I'm using zpix as my font. But the problem is when I load up the font in BM Generator I get tens of entries that all say "CJK Unified Ideographs" if I choose all of them the resulting bitmap is very large. I know nothing about Chinese but I wouldn't think that "Simplified" implies tens of thousands of letters.

We use this BM generator cause it works the best for our game ideally I would like to stick with it and not change programs.

Does anyone know which choices should I tick to get simplified Chinese?

Your help is much appreciated.

Here's a screenshot of the extension choices:

Answer 1

Simplified Chinese do include at least thousands of letters. The meaning of "Simplified" characters is that, the way to write each characters are simplified, but [most of] those characters are still separate from each other.

In fact, every years, there are still more and more Simplified characters being added to the standard.

Not all of these "CJK Unified Ideograph" are used in Simplified Chinese, and it can actually include characters that are exclusively used in Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean or other ethnic minority language in China, or other Chinese variants (as in "dialects"). Characters provided by the kIRG_Gsource at http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr38/index.html#kIRG_GSource include most of the Chinese characters submitted by PRC and Singapore which both use Simplified Chinese.

If you are looking for a minimal subset of Simplified Chinese charcaters that would be sufficient for 90% of usage environment then characters covered in the GB-2312 standard should be sufficient. There are also "IICore" that is the IRG-produced minimal set of required ideographs for East Asian use but I believe it isn't used much in real world.