Typophile

Common Chinese Fonts

lauretta

Anyone know what the Chinese equivalent of Times New Roman or Arial would be?

Normally when I design, I copy and paste content from my client's ms word doc that they typed on their PC into my design projects on my mac. Or, I flow it in. This works perfect.

Now, I need to copy content that is traditional Chinese typed on PCs and paste it into my projects (inDesign or ms word) on my mac. I do not speak or read Chinese.

I have lots of adobe and other fonts, but I believe I need the Chinese equivalent of Times New Roman or Arial that would be come standard on PCs sold to Chinese people.

John Savard

This site,

http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_ChineseTraditional.html

may be of service.

Karl Stange

In theory your OS and apps should ship with fonts to cover these requirements. Are you encountering problems when you paste the text?

Michel Boyer

The OS comes with fonts; the problem is to choose. For the fonts on the Mac, here is a list on Yales' site http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac/pages/osx7.html#fonts

The extesions TC means traditional Chinese and so I guess that Heiti TC would be suitable (I am no expert). I also understand from the list of characters sets http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac/pages/character_sets.html that Big-5 corresponds to Traditional Chineses and thus LiHei 儷黑 Pro and LiSong 儷宋 Pro as well as Apple LiGothic, Apple LiSung, and BiauKai should fit the bill but I would double check.

Michel Boyer

Here is what I found in the mac fallback file DefaultFontFallbacks.plist (comments from 10.6 and 10.7; the 10.8 file is a binary):

sans-serif: "for Traditional Chinese, use STHeiti TC"
serif: "for Traditional Chinese, use LiSong Pro"
cursive: "for Traditional Chinese, use BiauKai"

Those appear to be the default choices when Traditional Chinese is put before Korean, Japanese and Simplified Chinese in the System Preferences, Language & Text (I checked in Safari and TextEdit)

There is also another file, NSFontFallbacks.plist, with the following entries (PostScript names) for Traditional Chinese:

sans-serif: LiHeiPro
serif: LiSongPro

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