Asian Fonts - What Works, What doesn't?

usability, fonts, chinese

[mirkingrp]

What fonts do you use for chinese characters? What are the most common fonts on the web for Chinese sites? What about size? Also, how do you deal with multiple charsets within a site? I'm a developer at <url removed> and we have half of the content in GB2312 and half in UTF-8. How to deal with it?

[edited by: encyclo at 7:26 pm (utc) on Feb. 10, 2007]
[edit reason] no URLs please, see TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[bill]

We've recently covered this topic:

Charsets for Chinese [webmasterworld.com]

[mirkingrp]

Admin - this is not the same. Charsets!= Fonts!

all best

[bill]

A character set is not the same as a font. A font is a typeface. Although there may be similarly named typefaces (fonts) used in different language encoding schemes your initial post lead me to believe that you're talking about character encoding, not fonts. If so the referenced thread deals with the Chinese charset encoding.

In terms of actual fonts (typefaces) most Asian language sites do not bother specifying specific fonts. You can certainly do so via CSS, but few sites bother.

Character size is a preference of the user. A good design will leave that choice to the user's browser. Many of the better designs will not specify character size at all, but will remain flexible to the user's preferred settings. However, you can certainly adjust this size to your liking. I personally prefer to use a percentage setting if anything in my CSS for Asian language sites. This allows all browsers to resize the text if the user so desires.

[DamonHD]

Hi,

I (almost) never specify font types/faces at all, since it may be futile and will stop some readers being able to use your sites.

In line with bill's post, I use the relative sizing measures (eg something as simple as <big>) to bump up the size of Chinese text that is not readable unless rendered at a larger size than the surrounding Latin text.

Rgds

Damon