Chinese web fonts
Before we start, you have to know that there’s 2 versions of Chinese characters, they’re different, as a Taiwanese, I can’t read simplified Chinese very well.
Traditional Chinese – Mainly used in Taiwan and Hong Kong
Simplified Chinese - Mainly used in China
Not long ago a friend asked me how to set up Chinese web fonts in CSS when they were developing a website that supported multi-language. Their designer used some fancy fonts which were not safe on the website, so they had to make it into images if they want to use the fancy font. But now there’s a Chinese web fonts service Justfont (http://www.justfont.com) like Typekit or google web fonts that allow you to use web-font in Chinese, that’s a giant step in the Chinese internet community! But you still can just use safe Chinese fonts to make your website looks right.
Chinese fonts have Sans and Serif-sans as well, same as latin fonts, the list below is most common and very safe, looks good also :
Traditional Chinese
微軟正黑體(Microsoft JhengHei) – Traditional Chinese Sans
新細明體(PMingLiU) – Traditional Chinese Sans-Serif
Simplified Chinese
微软雅黑(Microsoft yahei) – Simplified Chinese Sans
宋体(SimSun) – Simplified Chinese Sans-Serif
Apply it
For example, the body font is Tahoma/ Verdana/ Arial, then just apply 微軟正黑體(Microsoft JhengHei) in your style for Chinese font:
font-family: "微軟正黑體", "Microsoft JhengHei", Tahoma , Verdana , Arial , sans-serif;
Don’t leave Chinese to default font anymore!
