A Chinese Font I've Searched For 15 Years
2025.8.1
As I've explained elsewhere, the so-called "script fonts?" in this page is actually a very old font that has been around for years. If my memory serves me correctly, I first encountered it in 2006 in a text editor with a weird built-in input method, and I've been wondering where that font comes from ever since, because most (if not all) bitmap Ming fonts has 1px strokes, which isn't really serif-y enough for a very serif-y family of typeface. This font that I was looking for is totally different: thick vertical strokes, proper serifs at the end of horizontal strokes, everything about it tells you its original designer was really trying to capture the essence of "Ming"-ness within the available limits.
And today I've finally been able to confirm a good part of its origin. As it turns out:
- It's originally made by the Institute of Software of "Academia Sinica" (which is now called the Chinese Academy of Sciences) in 1988.
- The font has been a part of XFree86, where Plan 9 got it from.
- Apparently it was donated to XFree86, but since XFree86 started a few years after the time mark of 1988, I'd imagine it had been used in certain internal systems and might have been distributed among colleges and institutes prior to this. It might have been released under the MIT license first and then picked up by XFree86 later; I didn't dig further.
Someone has made a vectorized version of the 16px font. I don't really recommend using it other than for stylistic reasons because it was designed against the GB2312 standard which lacks a lot of characters that may appear in the text you need to render (and font fallback is not pretty because it has such a distinct look), but I'm definitely going to use it when truly applicable.