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Most of the Chinese sites I have looked at do not specify the font, or if they do it's in local encoding, i.e., not the English name. It would seem from this that for normal text it might be advisable not to specify a font, but it would be nice to be able to give headings, etc., some impact.
SimHei looks ideal, but I have no idea if it is available as standard both on the mainland and also Taiwan, etc. It also doesn't seem to resize accurately, only looking its best in certain sizes.
Are there fonts which are guaranteed to work on all Asian PCs? Any help appreciated.
Harry
How would you declare a Chinese font-family? Are there serif and sans-serif derivations of the fonts?
Onya
Woz
The fonts on the Yahoo China CSS are:
MS Song, ËÎÌå, Beijing
I wonder if BestBBS v3.15 can handle those characters ;) Best to switch your browser encoding to GB2312 encoding...works for me.
Thanks for the help. It looks like not specifying fonts is the only sensible way to go for text.
Bill suggests bold and italic are OK. Are they universally recognized?
Harry
The spaced-out characters that result from double-byte encoding look awful, and I had been enclosing the English in a span specifying Verdana which looks a lot better, at least on my Western PC. But could this result in gibberish on an Asian PC without Verdana or a sans-serif font?
Would it be more sensible to ignore appearances and just encode the English as gb2312 or big5?
[added later]
If I input ASCII characters directly into Chinese text from my Chinese wp keyboard (NJStar), they are single-byte and don't look too bad. However the text only wraps at the end of a word which looks odd on a page layed out on a Chinese character grid.
However if I enter ASCII characters as double-byte symbols in Big5 they look OK but in gb2312 they have that spaced out look. But in both cases the text wraps on letters - not standard English practice but it looks better on the page.
Any comments on what is considered the normal approach?
[/added later]
Another thing to consider is that those English words may be interpreted differently by the Chinese SEs depending on how you enter them. Double byte text is read differently, so you may want to use both variations (maybe in a footnote or something) to make sure you get listed for both.
Harry
charset=UTF-8
will work fine on almost all Pcs in the world(not only in Asia).
Try that!
But I've already made the decision to go with GB2312 and Big5, rather than Unicode. It was the fonts I was undecided about. But now I'm just going to let the browser default to whatever is its standard. In fact the IE default fonts seem to resize better than any others.
