Best Font for Hanzi Chinese Font Download for Microsoft Word

When it comes to Chinese language, we don't need to quote numbers and statistics to convince someone that information technology's one of the most widely used languages in the world. Everyone knows that. It's a beautiful and fascinating language, and it looks then different than near western languages that we're used to.

How many kinds of Chinese are there?

As we know, Chinese tin can exist written with 2 unlike sets of characters — Traditional and Simplified. Both accept character shapes that are roughly square, and each character has a monospaced foursquare width, which forms clean grids no affair the management the text is typed in.

Simplified Chinese is more often than not used in People's republic of china, and information technology'due south been the official writing system at that place since 1954, while Traditional Chinese was used prior to 1954. Traditional Chinese is still used widely in Chinatowns outside of China, besides equally in Hong-Kong, Taiwan and Macau, where information technology'due south the official written language. In Red china, it'south used but in extremely formal cases. You can also find Traditional Chinese in other languages that take developed with influence from ancient Chinese.

Writing Chinese language

Historically, Chinese was set vertically and was being read from top to bottom and from right to left. However, in the 50s — alongside the introduction of Simplified Chinese — it became standard to write in the Western style, from left to right and from top to lesser.

Nowadays, Chinese text is more often than not read from left to right, the same as English language. Because of the square monospaced nature of the characters, it works equally well both horizontally and vertically. This means that in creative contexts, where blocks of texts are relatively brusk (similar book covers, logos and signage), information technology's ok to go artistic when it comes to how you layout characters without losing as well much readability.

Another pregnant characteristic of Chinese typography is the enormous variety of characters that are available. Without whatsoever exaggeration, there are literally thousands of them! The smallest standard Chinese font contains 6763 characters. A typical Chinese font file is unremarkably at least 5MB in size and some of them can exist over 20MB, which is problematic if you need it loaded on a website. That'due south the reason it takes so much fourth dimension and endeavour to create a Chinese font, and it's besides why Chinese fonts rarely take a multifariousness of weights — unlike their European counterparts, which often have every bit many as five dissimilar weights.

Chinese fonts

The two basic groups of Chinese fonts are songti (宋体), which you could retrieve virtually as the Chinese serif, and heiti (黑体) — the Chinese version of sans serif, respectively. Additionally, in that location are decorative brush script fonts called kaiti (楷体).

Songti (宋体)

If ane blazon of font had to be chosen to correspond Chinese typography, information technology would be the songti blazon. Early songti scripts were in use as far back equally the Song Dynasty (960-1279 A.D.), when Chinese woodblock printing was in its golden age.

Due to the grain of the wood in the woodblocks, which ran horizontally, horizontal lines were easy to produce and could be made thinner. Vertical lines, which ran counter to the wood grain, were prone to breakage during carving, and thus had to be made thicker. In addition, because the stop points of the horizontal lines were easily worn away, flourishes were added to make them thicker, and so they'd last longer. This is how songti — the Chinese serif characterized by perfectly direct horizontal strokes, wider verticals, and classy but regimented flourishes — was born.

The font Zhongyi Songti (中易宋体), or commonly known in English as SimSun, and its predecessor, New Songti (NSimsun – 新宋体) is the Times New Roman of Simplified Chinese, made popular due to its out-of-the-box inclusion in Windows XP. The Simsun dearest affair continued until very recently: it was still the default Simplified Chinese input font in Windows 7 systems. Inquire a Chinese web designer what makes an interface look "Chinese", and you'll often become a chuckle alongside the reply "Simsun, 12pt" — that should give you an thought of how widely this font was used.

Examples for Songti fonts: SimSun, FZCuSong, NSimsun;

Heiti (黑体)

The other major classification is the heiti, similar to "sans-serif". Heiti fonts are a relatively modern invention although they were seen emerging in commercial press around the early 1900's.

SimHei was the standard sans-serif to SimSun'south serif. Recently, Microsoft Yahei has started to supervene upon SimHei every bit the preferred standard in web layouts, just at that place are however a couple of compatibility problems: MS YaHei was introduced in Windows Vista, just the number of machines even so running Windows XP in Prc — even in 2020 — would blow your mind. So while everyone's pretty tired of looking at SimHei, we haven't quite reached the indicate where people are willing to requite it upwardly completely just yet.

Yuanti (圆体) is typically considered a subclass of Heiti (sans-serif). It's more of a search tag than a font type — the Chinese word yuan means "round", and that'due south exactly what these are: sans-serif fonts with soft curves at the corners. Yuanti is popular in modern corporate collateral and advertising materials. In that location are no web-standard fonts here either.

Examples for Heiti fonts: SimHei, Microsoft Yahei, Source Han Sans/Noto Sans, Yuehei, Shanghei;

Kaiti (楷体)

A kaiti font takes the shape of basic brush script lettering — or and so called "regular brush". A Kaiti font is nevertheless not a novelty font because it never gets overly flowery, yet it is constructed within certain parameters while maintaining an upright construction.

Examples for Keiti fonts: Kaiti (or Biao Kaiti), FZKai, Adobe Kaiti Standard

Which fonts should yous use?

We compiled a couple of convenient lists of fonts to choose from, according to your particular needs.

The most popular Chinese web-safety fonts:

1. 1. Heiti fonts:
      • Hiragino Sans GB (冬青黑体简体中文)
      • Microsoft Yahei (微软雅黑)
      • Simhei (黑体)
   2. Songti fonts:
      • Simsun (宋体)
        (most screens are still non-Retina, then information technology'southward much safer for designers to use Heiti fonts)

Chinese fonts for gratuitous commercial use:

• 方正黑体 FZHei-B01S
• 方正书宋 FZShuSong-Z01S
• 方正仿宋 FZFangSong-Z02S
• 方正楷体 FZKai-Z03S

If you need a universal multi-purpose font (especially for multi-language tasks):

Source Han Sans

It'southward a sans-serif gothic typeface family, created past Adobe and Google. It was also released by Google (under the Noto fonts projection) every bit Noto Sans CJK. What makes this font so special is the fact that Source Hans Sans has 65,535 characters and seven different weights (ExtraLight, Calorie-free, Normal, Regular, Medium, Bold, and Heavy), and it provides a consistent and systematic mode for Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Things get even improve— it's open-source!

A curious fact about this font: Despite having a "Regular" weight, it also has a "Normal" weight. The reason for that is the optical illusion that makes the font await bolder when used on a dark background. So, the Regular is for light backgrounds and the Normal is for dark ones. Not bad, eh?

Mixing Chinese and Western texts

Designers sometimes confront the challenge of working with a mix of languages. That is especially common in places such every bit Hong Kong, where both Chinese and English are considered official languages.

Information technology'south strongly recommended to add a space between Chinese and English, because English naturally has a space between words, while Chinese does non. Chinese also has larger spaces between each characters, compared to English messages. Ideally, there should be treated kerning between Chinese characters and English language letters. Luckily, both Adobe InDesign and Microsoft Discussion offer options on how to practice that.

The current trend

Equally we mentioned before, information technology takes a lot of effort to create a Chinese font. Fortunately, a lot of big Chinese brands — such every bit Alibaba, Xiaomi, Tencent, Vivo, and Oppo — are developing their ain fonts for marketing purposes. Hopefully, that will pb to a greater multifariousness of Chinese fonts in the future.

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