Simplified Chinese fonts generally refers to the Chinese characters officially simplified by the People's Republic of China government in an attempt to promote literacy. Mainland China and Singapore are the regions that typically use simplified Chinese characters.

A common codepage that is utilized by developers implementing Simplified Chinese fonts in their products is GB 2312-80, which consists of over 6000 frequently used Chinese ideographs used in mainland China. There is also the extension of GB 2312-80 called GBK which is encoded with 20,902 unified ideographs that are assigned in Unicode 2.1. GB 18030 was created as an update to GB 2312-80 for Unicode 3.0. Ascender’s Simplified Chinese fonts comply with the Chinese standards bodies and can be provided in a variety of code pages.

Styles

Ascender provides two main type styles for Simplified Chinese fonts which are similar to serif and sans serif style for Latin fonts. Mincho is a Japanese font style that has small serifs at the end of strokes and is used extensively for book and newspaper publishing The Mincho style would be similar to Times New Roman. This same style is called Sung for Chinese fonts. Simplified Chinese fonts that are in the Gothic style feature plain strokes with little or no serifs, similar to the Arial typeface. Gothic Simplified Chinese font styles work well for on-screen legibility.

Unicode

Ascender has extensive experience providing Simplified Chinese fonts in variety of formats and encodings. The most common encoding that developers utilize for Simplified Chinese fonts and other CJK fonts is Unicode. Unicode is an encoding standard which includes many characters, including Unified Han Ideographs and others essential for writing Asian languages. Although Unicode has been the preferred method for CJK and Simplified Chinese font encoding, Ascender has also delivered font data in other encodings, including Microsoft’s Shift JIS.

Please contact us to discuss with us your needs for Simplified Chinese fonts.