Frank Breen

Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Japanese and Korean Email Fonts

Discussion created by Frank Breen on Jan 15, 2016
Latest reply on Mar 12, 2019 by Frank Breen
  • Comment • 13

As a Western Email Developer I was asked to develop emails in Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Japanese and Korean (CJK). After a lot of research, testing and actual sends here is my guide.

 

First of all we need to declare English target fonts before Chinese target fonts, because English language fonts do not contain the glyphs for Chinese characters, but Chinese fonts do contain a-z characters. This means if you declare the Chinese fonts first, any English-language computer that has the standard Chinese font faces installed will display English characters using Chinese fonts (Example: Western installs of the Operating Systems) . This means English characters will be rendered in the first font and Chinese characters will be displayed using the fall-back Chinese fonts. Even if the Email is entirely in Chinese, English character will pop-up on occasion, so it's good to declare this way. The same theory goes for Japanese and Korean declarations.

 

Fonts for Chinese Simplified and Chinese Traditional:

 

Windows

宋体, SimSun

 

OS X

华文仿宋, STFangsong

 

The above is my tried and tested fonts, other fonts available are:

 

Windows

黑体：SimHei

新宋体：NSimSun

仿宋：FangSong

楷体：KaiTi

仿宋_GB2312：FangSong_GB2312

楷体_GB2312：KaiTi_GB2312

微软雅黑体：Microsoft YaHei

 

OS X

冬青黑体: Hiragino Sans GB

华文细黑：STHeiti Light [STXihei]

华文黑体：STHeiti

华文楷体：STKaiti

华文宋体：STSong

 

What this looks like in the declaration:

 

font-family: Arial, 宋体, SimSun, 华文仿宋, STFangsong, sans-serif;

 

Fonts for Japanese:

 

Windows

メイリオ, Meiryo

ＭＳ Ｐゴシック, MS PGothic

 

OX X

ヒラギノ角ゴ Pro W3, Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro

 

What this looks like in the declaration:

 

font-family: Arial, メイリオ, Meiryo, ＭＳ Ｐゴシック, MS PGothic, ヒラギノ角ゴ Pro W3, Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro, sans-serif;

 

Fonts for Korean

 

Windows

돋움, Dotum

 

OS X

굴림, Gulim

 

What this looks like in the declaration:

 

font-family: Arial, 돋움, Dotum, 굴림, Gulim, sans-serif;

 

It's best practice to use both the Local and English spelling of the fonts along with the PC and Mac declaration.

 

Attached below is a text document with declarations for easy reference.

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