I asked for input on this and a few readers have responded. Do I have to put quotes around Chinese fonts in font declarations? Which one you declare first should depend first on the platform you’re targeting. Just like with English-language fonts, you should declare at least one Chinese font for Windows and one Chinese font for Mac (as with the Arial / Helvetica nonsense).

This should apply even if your site is mostly in Chinese or is targeting a wholly Chinese audience, because English characters will pop up in Chinese language sites as a matter of course – in usernames, for example.įont-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Microsoft YaHei', '?', STXihei, '?', serif Declare the Microsoft font and the Mac font On the other hand, if you declare your English fonts first, Roman characters will be rendered in the first font, and Chinese characters will be displayed using the fall-back (Chinese) font.

What that means is that if you declare your Chinese fonts before your English fonts, any English-language computer that has the standard Chinese font faces installed will display English characters using Chinese fonts, and let’s be honest, English letters in Chinese font families are fugly. Why? Because English language fonts do not contain the glyphs for Chinese characters, but Chinese fonts do contain a-z characters. I’m sure someone’s come up with a standardized rule on this, but I’ve never seen one, so here’s mine: always declare all your target English fonts first. What this does is help reference the font file regardless of weather it’s been stored in the local system under its Chinese or western name – you’re covering all your bases here.įont-family: Tahoma, Helvetica, Arial, 'Microsoft Yahei','?', STXihei, '?', sans-serif Declare English target fonts before Chinese target fonts When declaring a Chinese font family, it’s typically a good idea to type out the romanization of the font (for example, “SimHei”) and declare the Chinese characters as a separate font in the same declaration. Good Rules for Using Chinese fonts in CSS Use the Chinese characters, and also spell out the font name

Since days of searching have brought me no closer to answering my most pressing Chinese font questions, I bit the bullet and sat down to do some testing and write up my own guide in English for Western web and UI designers targeting users in China (yeah, all three of us).Įverything I’ve written here is the fruit of my own experiments and tests, so if you notice something I’ve missed, do write me a note at First things first: What are the standard simplified Chinese web fonts? Windows

Nsimsun font