Download fonts used on this website
These fonts are specified as first choice in various stylesheets on this site. If you don’t have them on your computer you will get a second or third choice, which from my point of view is not aesthetically desirable, but cannot be helped. These are all common fonts, said to be 90–95% distributed on personal computers, so you are likely to have them already. But if you lack these fonts you may wish to download them here in Truetype (TTF) format for PC. Then just drag them into your FONTS directory, which is found in the WINDOWS folder. (Common Mac and Linux fonts have also been specified in my stylesheets, but I have none myself.)
Chinese fonts
I specify SimSun and PMingLiu as the Chinese fonts of choice. If you haven’t got a Chinese font you will get empty rectangles or question marks on pages that use encoded Chinese. If you don’t read Chinese, you may not care. On the other hand, imagine Chinatown with rectangular boxes and question marks everywhere. There is an aesthetic to Chinese characters even if you can’t read them.
I have noticed that if you have the Code2000 Unicode font installed it messes up the display of Chinese in Opera, Internet Explorer, and Outlook Express, by competing to display Chinese with its incomplete and rather ugly character set. So it’s best to remove that font if you have it.
While the PMingLiU or SimSun character set is fine for most uses, there is another Chinese font called ‘SimSun (Founder Extended)’ which has an extended character range and is four times the size of SimSun at 40 Mb. I haven’t yet found a need for this font as PMingLiU and the ordinary SimSun contain the characters I have used, but it can be found on the web under the file name SURSONG.TTF if you wish to load that font. ‘SimSun (Founder Extended)’ has marginally thinner strokes than SimSun, which I don’t think is as attractive.
Copyright © 2003–2023 Biroco