Vertical lines, which ran counter to the wood grain, were prone to breakage during carving, and thus had to be made thicker. This is how songti — the Chinese serif characterized by perfectly straight horizontal strokes, wider verticals, and classy but regimented flourishes — was born. The Simsun love affair continued until very recently: it was still the default Simplified Chinese input font in Windows 7 systems. Recently, Microsoft Yahei has started to replace SimHei as the preferred standard in web layouts, but there are still a couple of compatibility issues: MS YaHei was introduced in Windows Vista, but the number of machines still running Windows XP in China — even in — would blow your mind.
Yuanti is popular in modern corporate collateral and advertising materials. There are no web-standard fonts here either. A Kaiti font is still not a novelty font because it never gets overly flowery, yet it is constructed within certain parameters while maintaining an upright structure.
We compiled a couple of convenient lists of fonts to choose from, according to your particular needs. If you need a universal multi-purpose font especially for multi-language tasks :. The reason for that is the optical illusion that makes the font look bolder when used on a dark background.
So, the Regular is for light backgrounds and the Normal is for dark ones. Neat, eh? Designers sometimes face the challenge of working with a mix of languages. That is especially common in places such as Hong Kong, where both Chinese and English are considered official languages. Chinese also has larger spaces between each characters, compared to English letters. Ideally, there should be treated kerning between Chinese characters and English letters.
As we mentioned earlier, it takes a lot of effort to create a Chinese font. Fortunately, a lot of big Chinese brands — such as Alibaba, Xiaomi, Tencent, Vivo, and Oppo — are developing their own fonts for marketing purposes.
Hopefully, that will lead to a greater variety of Chinese fonts in the future. Skip to content. Gergana Toleva. Heiti is a bit like sans-serif: clean, straight lines without extra ornamentation at the ends, common on the web. Mingti is similar to serif, with extra embellishment at the end of strokes that give it a more bookish feel. After deciding whether to go in a Heiti or a Mingti direction, designers hone the typeface design further by looking for inspiration from sources as wide-ranging as calligraphy, ancient lettering, and other Chinese and Latin fonts.
For JinXuan, Justfont is attempting to apply the feel of the Latin typeface Optima —which blends the simplicity of sans-serif fonts with the extravagance of serif ones—to the writing style they found on an ancient scroll.
Su, the co-founder, studied Chinese literature in university. Underlying all of this thought is the goal of identifying a font-shaped hole in the market. With all this in mind, designers begin to actually draw the font as they imagine it.
They put pencil to gridded paper, sketching out initial passes at characters. At this point they are already exploring subtle variations. But the Eight Principles alone are not enough to represent the entire writing system.
To understand why the rest of the representative characters are important, we need to know a bit about Chinese characters themselves. A character is usually one or more radicals—which give it meaning—along with other parts that suggests how it should be pronounced. So if the tens of thousands of Chinese characters are really just re-combinations of a few dozen basic strokes the exact number is in dispute , why is creating a font so difficult?
This is true for many glyphs in Latin fonts, but Chinese is not so forgiving. So as designers tweak these representative characters, they also pay attention to how each individual stroke looks, because that will be important for other characters down the line. Even in cases where it is in the same position, such as the left half of the character, the stroke weights and shapes are slightly different the characters shown below are the exact same font and size.
Arphic actually has software that automates collecting the necessary components for a character, but that alone is never enough. A simple stroke may fit nicely in one character but upset the balance of another, maybe by being too thick when there are many thin strokes, or vice versa. This means that, as Chinese typeface designers continue to add to the set of representative characters, they find cases where the stroke and radical designs they were once quite proud of do not hold up to the range of contexts they need to be used in.
These assumptions must be constantly challenged and revised. The revisions are harsh and numerous. Yeh shuddered when she was shown a first-draft page of her designs—it had more red ink than black. These revisions can become especially numerous because designers do not focus only on individual characters, but must also pay attention to how all of the characters come together to create the whole typeface.
To create this uniform experience, designers must apply the style established for the representative characters to the thousands of rare and strange characters that are left.
They can finish anywhere between 10 and characters a day, getting faster as the style becomes more concrete. The sheer scale of the work involved has made it difficult for the Chinese language to enjoy the typographic diversity of Western ones, where there are varieties for every mood, style, and feel. Increased demand for new ones is changing the equation, as it has for other non-Latin scripts.
It raised 16 times that. One technological change is screen resolution. Until recently, screens were not able to handle the subtle curves and loops of more calligraphic Chinese. In fact, in the early days of computers, all but the simplest Chinese characters could not be represented accurately or even legibly.
The low resolution of early 8-bit Japanese video-game masterpieces, like those on the Nintendo Famicom, forced developers to use hiragana, the phonetic representations of characters, instead of kanji , the complex characters themselves, which come from Chinese.
Another big change in technology is the ability to distribute fonts through the web. It only takes a minute to sign up. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. Japanese fonts tend use wider lines and more curves. Chinese fonts tend to use narrow angular lines and there are differences at the end of strokes as well.
There are differences even when the Chinese traditional or simplified characters text uses the same character as the Kanji. This seems to occur everywhere, from train stations to store menus. Often the different fonts will be displayed together on the same screen, page, or sign. Is there a specific linguistic, cultural, or historical reason for this? Are Japanese and Chinese fonts different internationally or is this only in Japan?
Japanese and Chinese texts can be differentiated due to differences in vocabulary and whether they use Kana. This is different to using foreign words in italics Latin in English or Katakana English in Japanese as these fonts are used entirely separately for translations and are not intermingled.
For a recent example, this is a calendar produced by a Japanese company. Chinese and Japanese versions clearly have different fonts whereas English, French, and German have the same font for the same characters. Hiragana are obviously more cursive. Basically the overall appearances of typical Chinese hanzi and Japanese kanji fonts are not significantly different in terms of line width, roundness, etc.
If you compare recent professionally-made pamphlets of both languages from, say, Tokyo Disney Land, you should notice almost no difference. If you noticed some difference, it's probably because it is hard for a designer to find a Chinese font that looks similar to the Japanese font they want to use.
As a consequence, they often have to choose a Chinese font that looks different from the one used in the Japanese version. It's very easy to find fonts that can render all major Western languages, but finding a good-looking "Unicode" font that satisfies both Japanese and Chinese readers is still difficult.
Thanks to Adobe and Google, we now have at least one reasonable free font that offers consistent look across CJK languages. From Adobe Typekit Blog:. Source Han Sans, available in seven weights, is a typeface family which provides full support for Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese, all in one font.
We chose to partner with Iwata to expand our Japanese glyph selection. In Korea, we went with Sandoll Communication, who also designed the Korean hangul the native alphabet of the Korean language and in China, we partnered with our longtime friends at Changzhou Sinotype. Our project had now grown to become a collaborative effort between five companies — something somewhat unprecedented in the world of type design.
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