Chinese Fonts
汉字字体 Chinese Fonts
Click on any word to see more details.
Many of the concepts of Latin font design do not apply to Chinese fonts. Serif like endings of strokes are used but they are different in character and more variable. Chinese characters are nearly always the same width so the fonts are generally fixed width. In addition, the font metrics used for Latin fonts do not make sense for Chinese fonts. Calligraphic fonts do make sense and I will discuss them in more detail. Artistic fonts are at least as common for Chinese text but I will not discuss them.
Song typeface 宋体 also called Ming typeface 明体 is the most commonly used Chinese font for displaying and printing Chinese characters. Song is the equivalent of the Latin serif class of font families, since a key characteristic is the serif like stroke endings. Simsun, a Song font, is the default font for Chinese versions of Windows 95 to XP. It is shown below. The serifs like stroke endings are circled in red.
The equivalent to Latin sans serif fonts are Chinese Hei fonts 黑体 (Heiti). Text written using the Microsoft Sim Hei Font is shown below.
Wen Quan Yi Zen Hei, another example of a Hei font, is shown below. It has a slimmer design than Microsoft Sim Hei.
There are a number of very good artistic type Chinese fonts around. An example is the Arphic-Huochai-Bold (match stick) font shown below.
Dictionary cache status: not loaded