Typophile

Asian web font equivalents of Helvetica Neue and Baskerville Italic?

Daniel L0 votes

I'm an Asian font newbie utterly flummoxed with trying to find appropriate web fonts for a website.

For western European languages the site will use Helvetica Neue Light, Helvetica Neue Bold and Baskerville Italic.

But the site will also appear in Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and Korean, and I'm trying to find web fonts for those languages that are appropriate equivalents of Helvetica Neue and Baskerville Italic.

Googling for recommendations has just confused me further. Some people even suggest there's no sense using web fonts for Asian character sets because the file sizes would be impractically large. Others suggest that italic fonts aren't appropriate.

Can anyone help suggest what approach I should take here?

Any advice very much appreciated.

Hrant H Papazian0 votes

First, dump Helvetica.

hhp

Dave Ross0 votes

Mandarin and Cantonese are dialects and do not refer to the written language. For written Chinese there are two forms: traditional and simplified. Simplified Chinese is used only in the PRC.

Korean has fewer characters than there are letters in the English alphabet, so file size wouldn't be an issue there regarding web fonts.

This site may be useful (turn Google translator on):
http://www.justfont.com

Daniel L0 votes

Thanks Dave, that's really helpful. justfont.com looks promising.

I also discovered that fonts.com uses 'dynamic subsetting' to only download the characters you need for the current page, mitigating the problem of large file sizes.

Bill Davis0 votes

Yes, please take a look at our Fonts.com Web font service. It has both the Neue Helvetica and Baskerville web fonts you are looking for. And Fonts.com has an extensive selection of Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese web fonts as well (along with many other languages too).

As you pointed out, the Fonts.com Web font service uses dynamic subsetting for all Chinese, Korean and Japanese fonts. Dynamic subsetting automatically detects and instantly delivers the Web fonts for only the characters that are used, thus dramatically reducing font file size and web font download times. I hope you find this to be a solution that will solve your problem.

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