default serif font for Chinese (zh-CN)
August 27th, 2007 by Gen KanaiMozilla is working on better compatibility with non-English fonts in Firefox 3 for the Macintosh platform (changing defaults) and would love some help/feedback.
We have been told that the current default serif font for Mac “Song” is actually not widely installed (it looks like a MS font actually.) If you use the simplified Chinese version of Firefox on the Mac, what we call the zh-CN version, could you:
a) confirm (in the comments) if the font “Song” is a default font
b) if “Song” is not a default serif font, could you let me know what you would recommend for a Simplified Chinese serif font that is default to the Mac platform?
Thank you in advance!
Gen
August 27th, 2007 at 11:55 am
With a default installation, Mac OS X does not have the font “Song”. However, it has the font “STSong”. STSong seems to be the only font that would quality as being “serif”.
August 27th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
As kourge has already indicated, the term “serif” is not appropriate for chinese fonts, as chinese characters have undergone a totally different development history than western script. For instance, take the “hooks” (gou): they are not serifs, but instead they are an intrinsic property of Chinese script.
August 27th, 2007 at 5:27 pm
kourge- thank you! This is very helpful.
There are a few other options that I see here:
http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts_macosx.html#simplified
August 28th, 2007 at 1:46 am
The default, installed fonts (to my knowledge) that are zh-CN fonts, are the following:
Hei, Kai, STFangSong, STHeiti, STKaiti, and STSong.
Hei and STHeiti are similar fonts and would be considered “sans-serif”. Kai and STKaiti are similar fonts, and they have a traditional look (in a sense of looking like actual calligraphy). The only way I can describe STFangSong is that it looks like three quarters Kai and one quarter Song. I am not an expert in Chinese fonts, but it’s a more modern font.
Hei is roughly equivalent to Gothic in Japanese, I supposed both are used as the default UI font on Mac OS X. Song is roughly equivalent to Mincho in Japanese, in fact, Song used to be called Mincho in the Chinese advertising industry. Song is similar to MingLiu on Windows, but with slight differences regarding character components. Other than that the style looks pretty similar.
Note that on Windows XP, SimSun is the default zh-CN font, while MingLiu is the default zh-TW font. (Here, by “default font” I mean “default UI font”.) Windows Vista has new default fonts. zh-CN’s default font on Vista is YaHei, while it’s JhengHei for zh-TW. Funnily, Office for Mac installs SimSun and PMingLiu for you, probably for “interoperability” purposes.
November 2nd, 2007 at 12:39 am
I copied some fonts from my windows installation to linux.I noticed that only
microsoft YaHei looks good enough to be useable,that is,when i enable sub-pixel hinting.The rest like SimSun SimHei etc. looks too blurry.