Top Rated Chinese Fonts for Personal and Commercial use
This page offers a collection of Top Rated Chinese fonts in Songti and Heiti relevant typefaces. If you are new to Chinese Fonts and want to quickly understand top rated or top downloaded Chinese fonts, this page can be helpful. You can also use the advanced search tool dedicated for Chinese fonts to quickly search for the Chinese fonts, calligraphic designs and typefaces of your choice in Chinese Language.
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China is home to 56 ethnic groups, all of whom have played a critical role in the development of the various languages spoken in China. Linguists believe that there are 297 living languages in China today. These languages are geographically defined, and are found in China. Mandarin Chinese is the most popular language in China, with over 955 million speakers out of China’s total population of 1.21 billion people.
Songti (宋体) : If one type of font had to be chosen to represent Chinese typography, it would be the songti type. Early songti scripts were in use as far back as the Song Dynasty (960-1279 A.D.), when Chinese woodblock printing was in its golden age. Due to the grain of the wood in the woodblocks, which ran horizontally, horizontal lines were easy to produce and could be made thinner. Vertical lines, which ran counter to the wood grain, were prone to breakage during carving, and thus had to be made thicker. In addition, because the end points of the horizontal lines were easily worn away, flourishes were added to make them thicker, so they’d last longer. This is how songti — the Chinese serif characterized by perfectly straight horizontal strokes, wider verticals, and classy but regimented flourishes — was born.
Heiti (黑体) : The other major classification is the heiti, similar to “sans-serif”. Heiti fonts are a relatively modern invention although they were seen emerging in commercial press around the early 1900’s. SimHei was the standard sans-serif to SimSun’s serif. Recently, Microsoft Yahei has started to replace SimHei as the preferred standard in web layouts, but there are still a couple of compatibility issues: MS YaHei was introduced in Windows Vista, but the number of machines still running Windows XP in China — even in 2020 — would blow your mind. So while everyone’s pretty tired of looking at SimHei, we haven’t quite reached the point where people are willing to give it up completely just yet.