Currently, there are two different sets of Chinese characters used in different regions of the Chinese speaking world - simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese. In general, the Chinese character styles can be categorized into roughly 12 different styles, ranging from ancient oracles that symbolise natural objects and animals to modern sans-serif Chinese characters. Throughout the history of China, the building blocks of the Chinese written language has evolved with time. However, Chinese typography does have a much wider variety in styles.

Doing this allows the browsers to choose the best font available to display for optimised legibility. The generally preferred practice is to not specify any Chinese font styles in the body paragraph css, and specify charset=“utf-8”. “Hiragino Sans GB”, now considered the best quality Chinese sans-serif typeface available for the web (Mac only). It is a high quality sans-serif typeface similar to Microsoft Ya Hei on Windows. It is available on Windows operating systems since Vista.įor Mac OSX users, there is also a good choice: Hiragino Sans GB.

微软雅黑, Microsoft Ya Hei a sans-serif, arguably the most modern-looking Chinese web safe font available.

幼圆, You Yuan, a rounded font like comic-sans, but not as notorious.

黑体, Hei Ti, a sans-serif that resembles “Helvetica”.

宋体, Song Ti, a serif typeface used in most older websites.

For a long time, people resort to using only “web safe” Chinese fonts, which are:

Due to this reason, it is not feasible to use CSS embedding unless your website’s users have ultra-high internet speed. Because of the huge set of characters, Chinese font sizes normally range from 5 to 10 MB per file. A standard Chinese character set consists of about 10,000 unique characters, with only 3,000 of those characters common in daily use. Well, in the Chinese-speaking world, web designers don’t have that luxury.Ĭhinese character set is huge. With the advent of Google Web Fonts, Typekit and many other stable and easy to setup webfont providers, worrying about web-safe fonts has slowly faded into the back of web designers’ minds. Have you ever wondered why Chinese websites are not as diverse in typographical styles as in most modern English websites? Do you want to find out how to make your next Chinese web project more appealing to users? Read on…Īccording to a survey conducted by Smashing Magazine, a majority of websites have already adopted non-standard fonts as their primary typeface in 2013, which shows a growing variety and increasing liberty of typographic style on the web.

Chinese fonts microsoft word