
A Guide to Chinese CSS Font Family Declarations - kaptain
http://www.kendraschaefer.com/2012/06/chinese-standard-web-fonts-the-ultimate-guide-to-css-font-family-declarations-for-web-design-in-simplified-chinese/
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ttflee
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.

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.

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ttflee
> 微软雅黑体：Microsoft YaHei [as of Win7]

It is wrong to attribute Microsoft YaHei to Windows 7. YaHei was actually
introduced with Windows Vista.

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

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be5invis
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.

And there is still no good automatic way to generate gridfits, though there is
one for LGC, and Chrome is moving to Direct2D.

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kylebrown
But most pages in Chinese won't be showing all 10k+ glyphs on the same page.
Small pages won't have very many characters at all, a few paragraphs would
only be a few hundred different characters, so a minimal font file would be on
the order of kilobytes. 3k+ characters covers 98% of the text in a common
newspaper, that font file is on the order of a megabyte.

I've used FontForge to export much smaller font files containing only
particular characters. But there are also ways to store char fonts in json
using libs like typeface.js and cufon.

~~~
ttflee
> the order of a megabyte which is not acceptable for loading a web page.

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yzzxy
As the owner of a chinese-language website, I'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.

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TheSisb2
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!

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Gigablah
"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."

Malaysia and Singapore have also adopted simplified Chinese (GB2312).

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lepture
I've written an article on Chinese fonts too. But it is in Chinese:
[http://lepture.com/zh/2014/chinese-fonts-and-yue-
css](http://lepture.com/zh/2014/chinese-fonts-and-yue-css)

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matthewrudy
A good example of bad Chinese font use is Facebook chat (in a desktop
browser).

The font is tiny, and with traditional characters can be very difficult to
read.

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igl
That's weird. Specially since traditional characters are mostly used in Taiwan
and Hong Kong, where facebook should be accessible.

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Kiro
I didn't even know it existed different Chinese fonts. Shows how narrow-minded
I am.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Try using QQ to talk to Chinese people and you'll quickly become aware.
Tencent has made the "interesting" design decision to have you perceive other
people's messages in the font of _their_ choice, not your choice.

Presumably not an issue for real Chinese people, but it can give me
difficulties.

