These are some of the Chinese and Japanese fonts available on MacOS X and information about which features they include. Sometimes one can use a Chinese font for Japanese or vice versa reasonably well, but often it doesn't work at all. Korean fonts are much simpler. If a font contains Hangul it can usually be used for all Korean texts, traditional Chinese and rarely for anything else.
To type in Japanese, one needs a font that contains Kana (ひらがな, Hiragana and カタカナ, Katakana). To type Japanese vertical text, it is good to choose a font that has a vertical hyphen.
For some reason, a large number of fonts have double fixed width Pinyin characters only, and that is useless in most contexts. So to use Pinyin to express the sounds of Chinese, it is best to stick to the fonts with "x" in the Pinyin column, which have single width characters. The ones with "(x)" usually look ugly.
There are often two names for the fonts in the list below. The names with non Latin characters are displayed in MS Office and Adobe applications. The ones with only Latin characters are displayed in most other applications.
| Kana | Simplified Chinese | Cantonese | Traditional Chinese | Pinyin, (x) for fixed width | Vertical Hyphen | |
MacOS X Fonts |
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| 华文仿宋; STFangsong regular | x | x | x | x | x | |
| 华文宋体; STSong Regular | x | x | x | x | x | |
| 华文楷体; STKaiti Regular | x | x | x | x | x | |
| 华文细黑; STHeiti Light | x | x | x | x | x | |
| 华文黑体; STHeiti regular | x | x | x | x | x | |
| 華康標準宋體, DFSongStd | x | x | x | x | (x) | |
| Fang Song | x | x | (x) | |||
| Hei | x | x | (x) | |||
| Kai | x | x | (x) | |||
| Song | x | x | (x) | |||
| 蘋果儷中黑, Apple LiGothic Medium | x | x | ||||
| 標楷體, BiauKai | x | |||||
| 蘋果儷細宋, Apple LiSung Light | x | |||||
| Osaka – 等幅; Osaka Regular Mono | x | x | x | x | ||
| ヒラギノ丸ゴ Pro W4; Hiragino Maru Gothic W4 | x | x | x | x | ||
| ヒラギノ明朝 Pro W3; Hiragino Mincho Pro W3 | x | x | x | x | ||
| ヒラギノ角ゴ Pro W3; Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro W3 | x | x | x | x | ||
| ヒラギノ角ゴ Pro W8; Hiragino Kaku Gothic Std W8 | x | x | x | |||
Adobe Indesign Fonts |
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| Adobe 明體, Adobe Ming Standard | x | x | x | x | (x) | |
| Adobe 宋体, Adobe Song Standard | x | x | x | x | (x) | |
| りょう Display, Ryo Display | x | x | ||||
| りょう Text, Ryo Text | x | x | ||||
| 小塚ゴシッ, Kozuka Gothic | x | x | x | |||
| 小塚明朝, Kozuka Mincho Pro | x | x | x | |||
Microsoft Office Fonts |
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| 新細明體, PMingLiU | x | x | x | x | ||
| 宋体, SimSun | x | x | x | (x) | ||
| 儷宋 Pro; LiSong Pro | x | x | x | (x) | ||
| 儷黑 Pro; LiHei Pro | x | x | x | (x) | ||
| MS Gothic, MS ゴシック | x | x | (x) | x | ||
| MS Mincho, MS 明朝 | x | x | (x) | x | ||
| MS PGothic, MS Pゴシック | x | x | (x) | x | ||
| MS PMincho, MS P明朝 | x | x | (x) | x | ||
| ＤＦＰ勘亭流, DFPKanTeiRyu | x | x | x | x | ||
| ＤＦＰ教科書体W3, DFPKyoKaSho-W3 | x | x | x | x | ||
| ＤＦＰ痩金体W3, DFPSoKingW3 Regular | x | x | x | x | ||
| ＤＦＰ行書体, DFPGyoSho-L1 Regular | x | x | x | x | ||
| ＤＦＰ隷書体, DFPLeiSho-SB Regular | x | x | x | x |
There is also a page with short samples of these fonts and some Korean ones.
by Magnus Lewan