A Guide to Chinese CSS Font Family Declarations

While SimHei is not of as good quality as YaHei, I still have guts with YaHei, which renders a lot of glyphs with fluctuating baselines. Maybe it was the fault of Windows that renders glyphs of small sizes in a bad way, but I do hate the images using Microsoft Yahei, some of which were created in Photoshop on Windows.<p>Sometimes I even prefer SimSun, which is a serif font, and a bitmap font not supporting sub-pixel rendering, at least it has aligned baselines.

&gt; 微软雅黑体：Microsoft YaHei [as of Win7]<p>It is wrong to attribute Microsoft YaHei to Windows 7. YaHei was actually introduced with Windows Vista.

Well, actually if you search for &quot;免费中文字体&quot; in baidu.com and find &quot;下载&quot; in the pages you&#x27;ve got, you&#x27;ll very likely find out what you&#x27;ve downloaded are not font files, but some annoying and useless ads or even virus. So anyway, use Google.

There is a serious problem: Most Chinese fonts are HUGE, especially when you want to cover both Simplified and Traditional glyphs. For example, a CFF OTF Chinese font, covering all Han characters in BMP is about 34MB large, while its TTF variant is 12 MB.<p>And there is still no good automatic way to generate gridfits, though there is one for LGC, and Chrome is moving to Direct2D.

As the owner of a chinese-language website, I&#x27;ve read this guide (alongside many others) several times and found it extremely useful. However, I still have issues getting the same (standard) fonts to show up in every browser. I wonder if this is an issue on my side, or due to browsers not handling Chinese fonts adequately.

This is extremely helpful for someone trying to internationalize a website or web application to Chinese. I really do hope more work in this domain comes out and I learned many interesting things from the article. Thanks for taking the time to write about your findings!

&quot;If you are choosing fonts for a site that targets mainland China, choose GB2312. If you are targeting Hong Kong, China towns abroad and immigrant communities, Taiwan, etc., use Big5.&quot;<p>Malaysia and Singapore have also adopted simplified Chinese (GB2312).

I&#x27;ve written an article on Chinese fonts too. But it is in Chinese: <a href="http://lepture.com/zh/2014/chinese-fonts-and-yue-css" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lepture.com&#x2F;zh&#x2F;2014&#x2F;chinese-fonts-and-yue-css</a>

A good example of bad Chinese font use is Facebook chat (in a desktop browser).<p>The font is tiny, and with traditional characters can be very difficult to read.

I didn&#x27;t even know it existed different Chinese fonts. Shows how narrow-minded I am.