Comments on: default serif font for Chinese (zh-CN)

By: sr

sr — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 15:39:47 +0000

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.

By: kourge

kourge — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 16:46:06 +0000

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.

By: Gen Kanai

Gen Kanai — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 08:27:31 +0000

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

By: liaode

liaode — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 05:17:48 +0000

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.

By: kourge

kourge — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 02:55:22 +0000

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”.