Why?#
Because I like this serif font, it gives people a sense of printed material, heavy and serious. Personally, I don't like to use some handwritten fonts like KaiTi on electronic devices. Most websites on this site and xLog generally default to the browser's default sans-serif font, such as Microsoft YaHei on Windows and PingFang on Mac. It's not that they look bad; there's a reason why sans-serif fonts have become the default font for most electronic devices and public facilities—it's clear at a glance. However, from an aesthetic perspective, I consider blog articles to be akin to publications or books. In this sense, Songti is naturally more suitable, and on the other hand, it unifies the reading experience across different devices.
Noto Serif SC - easy on the eyes and free open-source for commercial use, covering a significant number of Chinese characters, so I’ll just use this one without bothering to choose.
If it doesn't work on your device, please Ctrl+F5 to refresh the browser cache. The first load may be a bit slow, please understand, thank you.
How to Change#
This site is currently hosted on xLog, which supports custom CSS.
Here, we use the Google Fonts service to load web fonts (due to platform restrictions).
However, everyone understands about Google, so we use the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Google Fonts mirror for normal usage in mainland China.
Noto Serif supports multiple languages, and similarly, xLog supports both simplified and traditional Chinese as well as Japanese and English. Although most visitors to this site are likely to be simplified Chinese users, I have simultaneously introduced these four fonts for perfect display.
TC or HK#
Here's a fun fact: there are some subtle differences between traditional Chinese used in Taiwan and that used in Hong Kong. There are even more minor differences in character shapes.
Noto Serif distinguishes between the two by using the suffixes Noto Serif TC (Traditional Chinese, which actually uses the more commonly used Taiwanese glyphs) and Noto Serif HK (Hong Kong glyphs).
The traditional Chinese font used on this site adopts the Taiwanese standard glyphs because in the language switcher provided by xLog (bottom right), the identifier for traditional Chinese websites is lang="zh-TW", not zh-HK or zh-hant.
(Microsoft Pinyin seems to default to Hong Kong traditional Chinese; this article was input using it.)
The Unused Hanazono Mincho#
To be honest, I initially wanted to use the Japanese Hanazono Mincho (Songti), which is an open-source font developed by GlyphWiki. It includes almost all Chinese characters and symbols in the current CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean unified ideographs) character set, including Hiragana, Katakana, and Latin letters, with good support for both simplified and traditional Chinese.
However, as you might guess, there’s a but. The Google Fonts version of Hanazono Mincho only includes commonly used Japanese kanji. If I were to load the original font file, which is several dozen megabytes, that would be too heavy.
This page has a preview of the font, where you can experience the exotic charm of Japanese kanji (not really).
Attachment: Font Preview#
(Simplified Chinese)
You stand on the bridge looking at the scenery,
The person looking at you is in the building.
The bright moon decorates your window,
You decorate someone else's dream.
(Japanese)
色は匂へど 散りぬるを
我が世誰ぞ 常ならむ
有為の奥山 今日越えて
浅き夢見じ 酔ひもせず
Update: There’s Actually More to This#
I researched Google Fonts again, and it's quite amazing; the SC fonts can display both simplified and traditional Chinese characters, and even some Japanese kanji, while the TC fonts can only display traditional characters (HK just adds a Cantonese vernacular).
I had been in a mental blind spot before, but now it seems that a Noto Serif Simplified Chinese font is sufficient; I have already streamlined the CSS.
By the way, I switched to a black-and-white Noto Emoji font.