Chinese Fonts

Both ANSI and UTF-8 are character encoding formats. ANSI is a Microsoft-specific standard mainly used to encode Latin alphabets, whereas UTF-8 is an implementation of Unicode that supports more than 128,000 characters.

Unicode is a universal character encoding standard. It defines how individual characters are represented in web pages, text files, and documents.

There are different types of Unicode encoding, with UTF-8 and UTF-16 being the most common. UTF-8 is widely used on the web and is the default encoding standard in many software programs.

UTF-8 encoding can use up to four bytes to represent a character. For English letters, UTF-8 uses one byte. European (Latin), Hebrew, and Arabic characters typically use two bytes. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other Asian characters use three bytes, while certain special symbols may require four bytes.

To type Chinese on your keyboard, you have several options. First, you can download Unicode fonts from the links above, install them on your system, then open any text editor such as Microsoft Word, select the Chinese font you installed, and start typing.

Alternatively, you can use our online Chinese typing tool which allows you to type in Pinyin (romanized Chinese) and get Chinese characters without installing any fonts.

For desktop typing, you can also enable Chinese input methods (IME) built into Windows, Mac, or Linux operating systems. These allow you to type Pinyin or other romanization methods and convert to Chinese characters on the fly.

Simplified Chinese (简体中文 - SC): Fewer strokes, easier to write. Used in mainland China, Singapore, Malaysia. Example: 学习

Traditional Chinese (繁體中文 - TC): Classical forms with more strokes. Used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau. Example: 學習

Choose SC for mainland audiences, TC for Taiwan/Hong Kong.

For modern sites: Noto Sans SC/TC (clean, 7 weights, perfect for body text).

For formal/news sites: Noto Serif SC/TC (elegant serif for long-form).

For artistic designs: Ma Shan Zheng (brush calligraphy) or ZCOOL QingKe HuangYou (bold vintage).

For Windows: Download the font file (.ttf or .otf), right-click on it, and select "Install" or "Install for all users". The font will be available in all your applications immediately. Windows 10/11 also includes built-in Chinese fonts like Microsoft YaHei and SimSun.

For Mac: Download the font file, double-click to open it in Font Book, then click the "Install Font" button. The font will be available system-wide. macOS includes built-in Chinese fonts like PingFang SC/TC and Heiti.

For Linux: Download the font file and copy it to the ~/.fonts directory (create it if it doesn't exist). Then run fc-cache -f -v in terminal to refresh the font cache.

After installation, you can use the Chinese font in any application like Microsoft Word, LibreOffice, Adobe Photoshop, web browsers, or design software.

Yes! All fonts are 100% free under SIL Open Font License or Apache License.

Noto CJK fonts are developed by Google + Adobe and completely free.

Use in websites, apps, logos, books, advertising - no royalties required.

For books/long texts: Noto Serif SC/TC (designed for book typesetting).

For business docs: Noto Sans SC/TC (7 weights for hierarchy).

For artistic prints: Ma Shan Zheng (traditional brush calligraphy).

Use 10-12pt minimum - Chinese characters are complex and need larger size.

CJK stands for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean - three East Asian languages that share many characters (especially Chinese and Japanese). CJK fonts are designed to support the thousands of characters needed for these languages.

Traditional fonts designed for Latin alphabets (English, Spanish, etc.) only need to support about 100-200 characters. In contrast, CJK fonts need to support thousands of characters - Simplified Chinese requires about 6,000+ characters for basic literacy, while Traditional Chinese and Japanese can require 10,000+ characters for comprehensive coverage.

The Noto CJK fonts (Noto Sans CJK and Noto Serif CJK) are comprehensive font families that cover all CJK languages in a unified design. This means you can use the same font family across Chinese, Japanese, and Korean content while maintaining visual consistency.

When you see "SC" (Simplified Chinese), "TC" (Traditional Chinese), "JP" (Japanese), or "KR" (Korean) in font names, these indicate region-specific variants optimized for each language's writing conventions and character forms.

Using proper CJK fonts ensures correct rendering of all characters, proper spacing, and culturally appropriate glyph shapes for each language.