Source Han Sans is a

sans-serif In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif (), gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than ...

gothic

typeface A typeface (or font family) is a design of Letter (alphabet), letters, Numerical digit, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, ...

family created by

Adobe Adobe (from arabic: الطوب Attub ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for mudbrick. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is use ...

and

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

. It is also released by Google under the

Noto fonts Noto is a free font family comprising over 100 individual computer fonts, which are together designed to cover all the scripts encoded in the Unicode standard. , Noto covers around 1,000 languages and 162 writing systems. , Noto fonts cover a ...

project as Noto Sans CJK. The family includes seven weights, and supports Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean. It also includes Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters from the Source Sans family.

Design

The Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters are taken from the Source Sans Pro family, and adjusted to fit in with Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) text. For example, in the normal weight Latin and Latin-like characters are scaled to 115% of their original size, hence they appear larger than Source Sans Pro at the same

point size In typography, the point is the smallest unit of measure. It is used for measuring font size, leading, and other items on a printed page. The size of the point has varied throughout printing's history. Since the 18th century, the size of a point ...

. For the Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters, the underlying design was designed by Ryoko Nishizuka from

. Multiple type foundries drew the glyphs for different languages based on the designs: Changzhou Sinotype and

Arphic Technology Arphic Technology Co., Ltd. (, aka.: Arphic Technology (文鼎科技)) is a type foundry based in Taiwan (Republic of China), founded in May 1990. Fonts Arphic PL Fonts Arphic Technology is the creator of the Arphic PL Fonts (where "PL" means " ...

for Chinese, for Japanese, and Sandoll Communications for Korean. Ken Lunde of Adobe consolidated the glyphs and created the final font resources, while Google provided funding, testing resources and input. Source Han Sans Version Difference

Source Han Sans has five versions: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese for Taiwan, Traditional Chinese for Hong Kong, Japanese and Korean. Because of the different conventions and standards in each region, the same character in Unicode may have different shapes in different versions. The font family includes seven font weights: ExtraLight, Light, Normal, Regular, Medium, Bold, and Heavy. At its release, the fonts contains 65,535 glyphs, the maximum limit for CID-based fonts. The font currently covers all of the characters in Unified Repertoire and Ordering of the

Unicode Standard Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 cha ...

in version 2.001, but still doesn't cover all of CJK Compatibility Ideographs and extensions of the

CJK Unified Ideographs The Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) scripts share a common background, collectively known as CJK characters. During the process called Han unification, the common (shared) characters were identified and named CJK Unified Ideographs. As of Uni ...

Release

The 28-font OTC version of Source Sans Pro became available in version 1.001. Source Han Sans version 2.000 is a major update of the font family, the major changes include: * Several glyphs proposed for CJK Unified Ideographs Extension G were included and accessible via the 'ccmp' GSUB feature. * The Hong Kong flavor of Traditional Chinese was introduced. * The glyphs for bopomofo were redesigned. * The glyphs for half-width jamo were replaced. * Macintosh 'name' table strings were omitted. * Regular weight is style-linked to the Bold weight. * The deprecated 'hngl' GSUB feature was removed. * The 'vert' GPOS (not GSUB) feature was added to support combining jamo in vertical writing. * Some glyphs for newer versions of Unicode were added. Version 2.001 added a new character stands for Japanese era name Reiwa, and several glyphs for Hong Kong locale. Version 2.002 fixed some bugs, and also moved 4 of the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension G characters to their designated codepoint, with the corresponding 'ccmp' GSUB feature removed. Version 2.003 introduced

variable font A variable font (VF) is a font file that is able to store a continuous range of design variants. An entire typeface (font family) can be stored in such a file, with an infinite number of fonts available to be sampled. The variable font technol ...

format into Source Han Sans as ''.otc'' suffix with CFF2 format table, which caused display issues with Windows 10. A version of variable font with glyf format table and ''.ttc'' suffix is released in version 2.004 for Windows along with other minor fixes. Noto Sans CJK fonts are released as individual fonts separated by version and weight, or as OTC fonts containing all versions separated by weight, or OTC fonts containing all weights separated by version, or a single OTC font containing all versions and weights.

Disputes

Before version 2.000, Source Han Sans only supported Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese, and the initial name given to the Traditional Chinese version is Source Han Sans TWHK, which is the initials for Taiwan and Hong Kong, however the Traditional Chinese version is based on Taiwan's ''

Standard Form of National Characters The ''Standard Form of National Characters'' or the ''Standard Typefaces for Chinese Characters'' () is the standardized form of Chinese characters set by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China (Taiwan). Lists There are three lists ...

'' instead of traditional printing press style (or known as ''

jiu zixing (), also known as inherited glyph form, or traditional glyph form, not to be confused with Traditional Chinese, is a traditional orthography of Chinese characters which uses the orthodox character forms, especially the character forms used i ...

'') which is widely used in Taiwan and Hong Kong or Hong Kong's ''

List of Graphemes of Commonly-Used Chinese Characters The ''List of Graphemes of Commonly-Used Chinese Characters'' () is a list of 4762 commonly used Chinese characters and their standardized forms prescribed by the Hong Kong Education Bureau. The list is meant to be taught in primary and middl ...

''. Both latter groups voiced their opinions and said that the name of ''TWHK'' is misleading, which later caused heated discussions between these users. It is later announced that Hong Kong (HK) version will be split with Taiwan (TW) version in 2015. Source Han Sans version 2.000 introduced at November 2018 added Traditional Chinese (Hong Kong) as Source Han Sans HK/HC, which follows Hong Kong's ''List of Graphemes of Commonly-Used Chinese Characters'', but no plans were announced to support traditional printing press style for Traditional Chinese users in Source Han Sans.

Source Han Sans HW (2015)

Introduced as part of Source Han Sans Version 1.002 update, Source Han Sans HW fonts are based on the corresponding Source Han Sans fonts, but include half-width glyphs for ASCII and small number of additional characters in Regular and Bold font weights.

Noto Sans Mono CJK

Noto Sans Mono CJK fonts are monospaced versions of Noto Sans CJK, which includes glyphs in 4 variants. Only regular and bold weight fonts were released. Noto Sans Mono CJK was introduced in Noto Sans CJK version 1.002 package. OTC fonts include Noto Sans Mono CJK, except for the region-specific Subset OTC fonts.

Source Han Code JP (2015)

Source Han Code JP (源ノ角ゴシック Code JP) is a

duospaced font A duospaced font (also called a duospace font) is a fixed-width font whose letters and characters occupy either of two integer multiples of a specified, fixed horizontal space. Traditionally, this means either a single or double character width, a ...

family using Latin glyphs from Source Code Pro, with Latin glyphs are scaled to match Japanese characters, and their widths are adjusted to be exactly 667 units (two-thirds of an EM). The remaining characters were from Source Han Sans JP fonts with glyph set supporting only Japanese.

References

External links

*Adobe Fonts page
Source Han Sans Traditional Chinese

Source Han Sans Simplified Chinese

Source Han Sans Japanese

Source Han Sans KoreanGoogle Noto Sans CJK
*GitHub pages
Source Han SansSource Han Code JP
{{Free and open-source typography Grotesque sans-serif typefaces CJK typefaces Adobe typefaces Free software Unicode typefaces