Back to collection

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.

Simsun - a Song Font
Simsun - a Song Font (Serifs 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.

Microsoft Sim Hei Font
Microsoft Sim Hei Font

Wen Quan Yi Zen Hei, another example of a Hei font, is shown below. It has a slimmer design than Microsoft Sim Hei.

Wen Quan Yi Logo
Wen Quan Yi Zen Hei Font [Fang 2009]

There are a number of very good artistic type Chinese fonts around. An example is the Arphic-Huochai-Bold (match stick) font shown below.

Arphic-Huochai-Bold
Arphic-Huochai-Bold [Arphic]

Dictionary cache status: not loaded

Glossary and Other Vocabulary