ePub chinese fonts

[ebookscovers]

Hi there. hopefully should be a simple question. what's the best font for displaying Chinese lettering in an ebook ePub file the at displays chinese characters without any issues. need regular and bold chinese font. surely there's a standard few chinese fonts that work fine. needs to also display on kindle and all devices. thanks David

[Quoth]

Older Kindles won't do Chinese, and only a few Greek Characters etc that happen to be in the pre-installed Roman-Latin fonts.

Most newer Kindles will show which ever Chinese you embed in the epub (Amazon KDP takes epub2 uploads by preference), BUT only at all when the user selects Publisher fonts.

It's a simple reasonable question with no clear answer. Blame US centric software developers because this was a problem solved maybe 15 years before the first Sony ereader and nearly 20 years before a Kindle came out. Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Korean, Hindi and Japanese has been a problem.

Most epub based devices have depended on Adobe (USA again) reader software.

[Moonbase59]

I have made good experiences using

- Microsoft YaHei (regular and bold)
- the Kurinto CJK font families, like "Text"

These fonts have the best glyph coverage I know of. Due to the number of glyphs, all of these are extremely large. So not ideal for embedding, but great for loading onto the device.

Good luck!

[Notjohn]

Kindle supports traditional Chinese only, and only in the ebook.

Furthermore, the Amazon.CN website doesn't display self-published ebooks, for the obvious reason. So that limits distribution to Taiwanese and such of the diaspora as might be interested.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Moonbase59

I have made good experiences using

- Microsoft YaHei (regular and bold)
- the Kurinto CJK font families, like "Text"

These fonts have the best glyph coverage I know of. Due to the number of glyphs, all of these are extremely large. So not ideal for embedding, but great for loading onto the device.

Good luck!

Subesetting will make these fonts much smaller in size. Calibre does an excellent job of subsetting.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by ebookscovers

Hi there. hopefully should be a simple question. what's the best font for displaying Chinese lettering in an ebook ePub file the at displays chinese characters without any issues.

The List of CJK fonts Wikipedia entry lists a couple of free Chinese fonts. (CJK = Chinese, Japanese, Korean.)
I'd recommend Source Han Serif and Source Han Sans.
Since these fonts are rather large, you might want to subset them. You'll also need to find out, if the text is encoded as Simplified Chinese or Traditional Chinese.

Since all Kindle models released in the last 7 years come with CJK fonts, you won't have to embed any fonts for the Kindle version of your book.

Originally Posted by Notjohn

Kindle supports traditional Chinese only, and only in the ebook.

You're mistaken, Kindles support both Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese.

[Quoth]

Since all Kindle models released in the last 7 years come with CJK fonts, you won't have to embed any fonts for the Kindle version of your book.

There are plenty of more than 7 YO Kindles in use. I think any with FW 3.4x or later (KK3) may have the fonts and certainly ought to work with embedded fonts. But users have to select Publisher Fonts.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by Quoth

There are plenty of more than 7 YO Kindles in use. I think any with FW 3.4x or later (KK3) may have the fonts and certainly ought to work with embedded fonts. But users have to select Publisher Fonts.

I used to have a Kindle Keyboard, and, IIRC, one of the last firmware updates added the Chinese fonts (ST Song, ST Heiti, ST Kai and ST Yuan).

@ebookscovers

For more information also see the Should Chinese Fonts be Embedded in Ebooks? thread.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

The List of CJK fonts Wikipedia entry lists a couple of free Chinese fonts. (CJK = Chinese, Japanese, Korean.)
I'd recommend Source Han Serif and Source Han Sans.

👍👍

Originally Posted by Doitsu

For more information also see the Should Chinese Fonts be Embedded in Ebooks? thread.

👍👍

Also see the mini-tutorial I wrote explaining how to properly mark your HTML+CSS + how to subset the embedded fonts:

2021: "Japanese characters not showing up on some devices"

I used Japanese in that, but the same exact logic applies for Chinese, Korean, ..., Greek, or any other language where you use a font for just those "foreign words".

Originally Posted by ebookscovers

hopefully should be a simple question. what's the best font for displaying Chinese lettering in an ebook ePub file the at displays chinese characters without any issues. need regular and bold chinese font.

Yep. See my Japanese answer above + my Chinese thread that Doitsu linked.

Originally Posted by ebookscovers

surely there's a standard few chinese fonts that work fine. needs to also display on kindle and all devices. thanks David

Just remember, all the usual "embedded fonts" issues still apply.

Most devices have "Publisher Fonts" OFF by default. So your embedded fonts won't work unless users go out of their way and ENABLE that setting.

This is why you should follow best practices + design the ebook as best as you can.

Side Note: If you want to read more about "embedded fonts" in ebooks, type these searches into your favorite search engine:

embedded fonts Hitch site:mobileread.com
embedded fonts Tex2002ans site:mobileread.com

There have been 10+ years of topics discussing fonts from every possible angle.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Moonbase59

I have made good experiences using

- Microsoft YaHei (regular and bold)
- the Kurinto CJK font families, like "Text"

These fonts have the best glyph coverage I know of.

Thanks. I wasn't aware of Kurinto.

Side Note: But be very careful. Fonts have all different types of licenses. These font licenses specify things like:

• "Is this for personal or commercial use?"
• "Is this allowed to be embedded in books?"
• "Can this be used on websites? Or only offline documents?"
• "Can I change this font?"
• [...]

Kurinto is under the "SIL Open Font License Version 1.1". This license means you can pretty much use it anywhere you want.

Microsoft YaHei is not allowed in ebooks. That font falls under "Microsoft's Font License". Usually those are allowed only in:

• Windows
• Word Documents
• PDF

When you purchase Windows and/or Microsoft Word, you're paying for fonts like Arial + Times New Roman. At that low price though, they ONLY allow you to use the fonts for X specific uses, NOT allow you to do whatever you want and "redistribute" them.

In ebooks, you're embedding the entire font file inside... and Microsoft (and many other font companies) don't take too kindly to that.

To get that embedding "privilege", you'd have to purchase a completely different license (usually hundreds/thousands of dollars). And usually, you have to purchase each individual fontface separately—one for Regular, one for Italic, one for Bold, BoldItalic, Smallcaps, etc., etc.

See Hitch's 2016 post as an example:

Originally Posted by Hitch

[...] any font that you actively put in an eBook will most likely need licensing. Most fonts are simply licensed for "desktop publishing" purposes, which is very different than "embedding" or "redistribution." [...] Be aware that licensing a font for redistribution/embedding usually increases the desktop publishing price by a factor of 10 or more. I just today looked at a font that was $79.50 for both Desktop Publishing and Webfonts (websites, essentially) licensing, and it was $795.00 for a single eBook license.

This is why most people just don't bother to embed these proprietary fonts in their ebooks, because it becomes prohibitively expensive.

Side Note #2: And similarly, this font licensing topic has been discussed to death over the years. Search for this in your favorite search engine:

licensing font Hitch site:mobileread.com

and you'll see lots of discussion.

Lots of people don't think about it. They think:

"Since I can use 'Times New Roman' on the computer or my PDFs (Print/InDesign files), I can just toss 'Times New Roman' right in my ebooks!"

or:

"Hey, Adobe InDesign gives me fonts FROM 'THE CLOUD' for a few dollars a month. I can put this in my ebooks!"

Nope. That's not how it works.

Originally Posted by Moonbase59

Due to the number of glyphs, all of these are extremely large. So not ideal for embedding, but great for loading onto the device.

Yep, subsetting takes care of that though. It will remove all the unused characters, so the font file should shrink dramatically.

[Moonbase59]

Yup, good point you explained more, @Tex2002ans. I was naively assuming @ebookscovers only wanted to read some Chinese ebooks on his/her own personal eReader.

For producing ebooks (that shall contain the font(s)), of course correct licensing and subsetting is the way to go. Fortunately we do have people like Mr Gross that make fonts like Kurinto available under the OFL. (He even offers metric-compatible substitutes for Arial, Times New Roman, etc.)

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Thanks. I wasn't aware of Kurinto.

(snippage for brevity)

"Hey, Adobe InDesign gives me fonts FROM 'THE CLOUD' for a few dollars a month. I can put this in my ebooks!"

Nope. That's not how it works.



Yep, subsetting takes care of that though. It will remove all the unused characters, so the font file should shrink dramatically.

In case someone reads this post and not any of the others that Tex has linked, the challenge with the Adobe-->InDesign-->eBook font embedding is that the fonts are encrypted and thus, will not pass ePUBcheck.

So, sure, the fonts are embedded, as Adobe so blithely assures you and yes, the ePUB works--but you can't sell it anywhere. Because every vendor on the planet requires ePUBcheck so you can't get there from here.

(Unless you deliberately hack the encrypting, but that's a different discussion. We've had that discussion here too and I'll simply stand by my interpretation that since Adobe expressly says that you can't unencrypt the fonts, that that's what they mean.)

Hitch