Fonts begin where character sets end. The characters defined by the encodings inside your computer are abstract, whereas the glyphs defined by a font are concrete visual forms that can be rendered on screen or paper.
Outline fonts are fonts in which glyphs are described mathematically as "outlines," a series of line segments, arcs, and curves. They are fully scalable: to print or display a character, the outline is scaled to the desired size, then rendered by filling the outline with bits or pixels. The information provided here is limited to what the typical Chinese Mac user might want to know. If you want to learn more about font formats and printing technologies, Ken Lunde's CJKV Information Processing is very thorough on these topics.
Font Fangsong Gb2312 Font
Developed by Adobe, PostScript is a "page-description" language for printers. It supports both graphics and text, with built-in support for fonts. The most common PostScript font format is Type 1. Chinese Postscript fonts use the CID format, which uses Type 1 character descriptions tailored especially for East Asian writing systems. CID stands for "Character Identifier," which refers to the numbers that are used to index and access the characters in the font. OS X provides full support for all types of PostScript-based fonts.
In 1991, Microsoft adopted Apple's TrueType font format, but they used a different approach to storing the font data. Font files had to be converted between Windows and Macintosh. Regardless, all TrueType fonts contain "cmap" tables that map its glyphs to various encodings. With Mac OS X 10.5 (2007), Apple introduced full support for Windows TrueType font files, but the files must contain Unicode cmap tables. Most Windows 98 and later fonts have them, while most Windows 95 and earlier fonts do not.
OpenType is an open standard developed by Microsoft and Adobe in 1996 to absorb the underlying differences between the TrueType and PostScript formats. OpenType fonts also use cmap tables. There are two kinds of OpenType fonts: those that use PostScript Type 1 names and outlines and carry the .OTF extension, and those that use TrueType names and outlines and carry the .TTF (or .TTC) extension.
TrueType "collections" with the .TTC extension contain multiple fonts, usually different weights of the same font. They can also use the Unicode technology of glyph variants (supported in OS X 10.6 and above) to provide localized glyphs for users in China/Singapore (the "SC" locale), Hong Kong (the "HK" locale), and Taiwan (the "TC" locale).
One way for individuals to obtain reliable, high-quality Chinese fonts is in retail bundles from established foundries. There aren't many of these companies. The making of an original Chinese font is a huge undertaking, somewhat less so now with the advent of new approaches and advanced technologies, but producing a finished, unique font is still a monumental task, involving a team of people working for months, if not years.
Many font bundles include installers (and other software) that only work on Windows, and thus they are sold as Windows-only, but you can always manually install the fonts on OS X. The best place to put them is in a folder of their own within your computer's /Library/Fonts/ folder, or your local /Library Fonts folder, which is where Font Book puts them if you use it to install them.
The current model for distributing fonts is via annual subscriptions. Adobe led the way with what is now TypeKit, and the rest of the industry has, for the most part, followed their lead. [NEED MORE DETAILS HERE] [DISCUSSION OF WEB FONTS AND CSS3]
Hong Kong. Formerly DynaLab. Maker of the "DynaFont" [金蝶] line.Theyarethe source of the current Apple fonts LiHei Pro and LiSong Pro in OS X, as well as most of Apple's fonts for Traditional Chinese in the Chinese Language Kit and OS 9. They also make the MingLiU/PMingLiU and DFKai-SB fonts that come with Windows. Most recently, their Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taiwan divisions worked together with Apple to create PingFang, the new system font introduced in OS X 10.11 El Capitan.
There are Pro and Home (less expensive, for non-commercial use) editions available for DynaFont's 2016 TrueType font bundle: [Pro PDF] [Home PDF] They also sell an OpenType variant of the Pro edition, in which the font names match those of DynaFont's high-resolution CID-keyed fonts used by publishers: [OpenType Pro PDF]
Beijing Hanyi is a well-known Chinese foundry, with an excellent web site showing a fine selection of original fonts, most available online through LinoType. Priced for the commercial publishing market.
Beijing. Founder Group was created at Beijing University in 1986 and incorporated in 1992. Maker of the "Microsoft YaHei" fonts that come with Windows Vista and later, as well as Simsun (Founder Extended).
Another important commercial foundry is SinoType in Changzhou, Jiangsu. They don't sell fonts retail, but their "ST" fonts have been widely distributed on a variety of platforms, including OS X (STHeiti, STKaiti, STSong, and STFangsong) and Microsoft Office. Adobe Heiti Std, Adobe Kaiti Std, Adobe Song Std, and Adobe Fangsong Std are also based on the ST fonts.
Adobe's Creative Cloud installs two Chinese OpenType fonts by default, Adobe Song Std Light and Adobe Ming Std Light. You can use TypeKit to install current versions of the CS 6 fonts listed below, along with Source Han Sans and Source Han Serif.
Adobe's "Std" designation means the fonts cover standard Chinese character sets as defined in the Adobe GB1 and CNS1 collections, without defining glyph variants or other "Pro" OpenType features. As of 2017, Adobe does not provide "Pro" Chinese fonts.
Hiragino Sans GB Beginning with OS X 10.6, Apple includes this GB18030 character-set font in two weights [Hiragino Sans GB W3.otf, Hiragino Sans GB W6.otf]. Designed to coordinate with Hiragino Sans, a Japanese font that comes in ten weights.
Arial Unicode MS Beginning with OS X 10.5, Apple includes this basic Monotype Unicode font from Microsoft Office [Arial Unicode.ttf] for the same interoperability reasons it includes other Microsoft Office fonts, like Arial, Courier New, Times New Roman, Tahoma, Verdana, and so on.
In addition, the Microsoft Office XP Proofing Tools (and Chinese editions) include the font Simsun (Founder Extended) [SURSONG.TTF, 宋体-方正超大字符集]. Created in January 2001, it contains over 64,000 hànzi, including most of the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B block. Works perfectly in OS X 10.3 and above. Install it in the /Library/Fonts folder, and re-login after installing it. To avoid problems in OS X 10.4 and above, you should use Font Book to install this font. Use File > Add Fonts...
These are useful, free fonts from Google in seven weights (each) that pretty much everyone should have, unless you have already installed Adobe's Source Han Sans and Source Han Serif, which are the same fonts. The principal designer was Ryoko Nishizuka of Adobe, working with Google and three font foundries in China (SinoType), Korea, and Japan. The selection of the character set was overseen by Ken Lunde of Adobe.
The basic idea is a set of fonts that can be used together as a unified font in a document that combines CJK languages, with the forms of the glyphs for each language correct for that region. They neglected to include glyphs localized for Hong Kong, but that will be rectified in v 2.000. You set them as the default for each language in your word processor or page design application, and off you go:
Andrew West's free, open-source BabelStone Han font is focused on providing GSource glyphs (i.e., those defined by China as the standard forms) for Unicode hanzi. His discussion of the details of this ongoing project is illuminating. West is an IRG participant as a member of the UK delegation, so he is well-informed and up-to-date on the progress of their work, and his fonts reflect that knowledge. See:
None of the tools listed here provides specific information about Chinese character-set coverage in a given font. At best, they organize the glyphs in a font by Unicode character blocks. This can be helpful, but it won't tell you, for example, what version of Hong Kong SCS is supported. Toward that end, we provide text files containing the hanzi for selected Chinese character sets:
Comes with OS X. You can create smart collections for Chinese fonts by setting the Languages criteria to "Chinese (Simplified)" and/or "Chinese (Traditional)." "Chinese" also works. For the most complete collection, use all three together. This works well for the fonts that come with OS X, but YMMV when you start adding other fonts:
Primarily a font manager like Font Book, but functions well as a font viewer, also like Font Book. LinoType is a vendor of high-quality fonts from a wide range of foundries, including Chinese. See our discussion of Chinese font foundries, above. OS X 10.9 and above.
From the makers of DTL FontMaster, Dutch Type Library's OTMaster 6 allows you to review and edit the tables and contours of fonts in all OpenType and TrueType formats. Full Unicode support for large CJK fonts and complex-script (Indic, Arabic etc.) fonts.
As of December 2017: "CJKV fonts may be imported into FontLab but they can only be generated as TrueType fonts and will have no vertical metric sidebearings." I don't know what that means, but FontLab has a history of good support for Chinese fonts in products like AsiaFont Studio.
This is a list of notable CJK fonts (computer fonts which contain a large range of Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters). These fonts are primarily sorted by their typeface, the main classes being "with serif", "without serif" and "script". In this article, the two first classes are named Ming and sans-serif (gothic) while the "script" is further divided into several Chinese script styles.
First of all we need to declare English target fonts before Chinese target fonts, because English language fonts do not contain the glyphs for Chinese characters, but Chinese fonts do contain a-z characters. This means if you declare the Chinese fonts first, any English-language computer that has the standard Chinese font faces installed will display English characters using Chinese fonts (Example: Western installs of the Operating Systems) . This means English characters will be rendered in the first font and Chinese characters will be displayed using the fall-back Chinese fonts. Even if the Email is entirely in Chinese, English character will pop-up on occasion, so it's good to declare this way. The same theory goes for Japanese and Korean declarations. 2ff7e9595c
Comments