I am styding simplified Chinese chars. I've noticed that Skritter teaches me to write 真 like this: 眞. My wife, who is Chinese and a linguist, says that's an old writing. So I guess it is better to stick with 真 writing instead. Please, correct me if I am wrong.

that's strange... I'm pretty sure Skritter prompts me with 真.

Is it possible you accidentally added it manually or from a list where it was entered traditionally?

In fact, I was wondering about that in general, is it currently possible to add traditional characters either accidentally or intentionally if you have chosen to add "simplified" from the account options.

You can't, no. You can put them into scratchpad and maybe cram, but it will convert whatever form you put in into what you're studying. Unless you put it into the queue, and then it takes whatever form you put in, but won't add it unless you're studying that form.

For 真, is it in definition practice that you see 眞? It's possible that you could see that if Skritter picked the wrong font. But font issues shouldn't affect writing practice.

I saw it in writing practice. What is interesting, after writing it, I saw 真 in the part of screen where the pronunciation and meanings are explained.

BTW, later today I was writing this char again and it was 真 this time. Did you guys change anything?

Just a side talk, the traditional version of 真 is 真too. The 眞 is a variation of 真 that no one uses any more and that you can only find it in very old books.

Huh, that's weird. I don't think we changed anything, but maybe we cleared out some cached badness somehow. Let us know if it shows up again.

Well, it showed up again. This time in the definition practice. Here comes a screenshot:
http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/4678/screenshotlt.png

Hmm. Can you tell me, for each of these fonts, whether you have it installed?

AR PL UKai CN
Kai
KaiTi
楷体
FangSong

Thanks!

Wow, thats such a cool way to write 真, I might write that just to freak my teacher out. Perhaps in the very distant future Skritter will even start teaching us classical Chinese!

If you like that, you might also like this webpage, which has ancient forms for lots of characters: http://www.internationalscientific.org/CharacterASP/CharacterEtymology.aspx?characterInput=%E7%9C%9F&submitButton1=Etymology

Nuts, the link didn't work, but just copy-paste a character into the little dialog box.

Regarding the fonts, I have only 'AR PL UKai CN' among mentioned.

Looks like I'll have to get rid of that font, then, if it's misdisplaying that character. These kaiti fonts are hard to get right!

This post is about the AR PL UKai font in the Debian package ttf.arphic.ukai (as of NOV08).
I found some characters, including the subject of this thread, that differed from my other sources, including Wenlin. I found the maintainer's mailing list and reported these in Nov 08.

In each case, I was told that what I was seeing was a "glyph variant" or "regional variant". In one case he said it would be fixed in the next release, in another he said the variant was "also valid" and would be retained. Upon reporting the third one, on 16NOV08, part of the reply was this:

***
"In the basic CJK Unified Ideographs block of Unicode alone, there are about 10,000 codepoints which have such glyph variants. I have a list of them and will implement them into the UMing and UKai fonts over time.
Problem is: I don't have much time in the moment, so the process is stalled, right now.
FYI the document with the glyph shapes as used in each region is here:
http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/c039921_ISO_IEC_10646_2003(E).zip"
***

At that point, I regret to say, I switched to kaiti.ttf 11.2MB version 5.01, borrowed from my XT, and have been happy with it. My only problem has been in keeping other (partial) Chinese fonts off my system so it looks at only this one.