Fonts

Serif and sans-serif fonts

Fonts are divided into serif and sans-serif families, with clear differences in appearance, visual character, and suitable uses.

Serif

Serif fonts have decorative strokes at the beginnings and ends of letterforms, and their stroke widths often vary noticeably. They feel traditional, formal, elegant, and authoritative. Serifs emphasize where strokes begin and end, help guide the eye along a line, and can reduce fatigue in long passages. They suit books, newspapers, academic journals, formal reports, contracts, and premium brochures. Examples include Songti and Source Han Serif in Chinese, and Times New Roman, Georgia, and Garamond in English.

Sans-serif

Sans-serif fonts omit decorative stroke endings and usually use more even stroke widths. They look clean and modern, creating a casual, relaxed, contemporary, or technical feeling. Their clarity at small sizes, on low-resolution screens, or from a distance is often better than serif fonts, making them the mainstream choice for screens. They suit user interfaces, apps, web copy, charts, presentations, posters, and brand marks. Examples include Heiti, Microsoft YaHei, Source Han Sans, and PingFang in Chinese, and Arial, Helvetica, Roboto, and Open Sans in English.

Fonts for reading novels on mobile apps

For novels on a mobile app, the core principle is to prioritize screen readability. Sans-serif fonts are the first choice. If you prefer the immersion and literary atmosphere of a printed book, choose a serif face optimized for screens. Traditional print Song faces may look faint or crowded on a phone because of thin strokes and complex serifs, increasing eye strain. These fonts perform especially well for screen reading:

Sans-serif fonts

• System sans-serif fonts: Apple SF Pro / PingFang, Huawei HarmonyOS Sans, Xiaomi Mi Lanting, and Android’s Source Han Sans (Noto Sans CJK). They are professionally tuned for screens, with open structures and stable rendering, and work across apps without extra downloads.
• FZYouHei: Designed for screen reading, with soft rounded strokes and open counters that reduce fatigue during long sessions.
• LXGW Neo XiHei: An optimization of Source Han Sans that improves small-size rendering for a more comfortable reading experience.

Serif fonts

• LXGW WenKai: Combines FangSong and Kai characteristics, with soft strokes and generous spacing. It balances literary character with screen clarity and suits reading long texts for more than an hour a day.
• FZ Screen YaSong: Adjusts serifs and internal proportions for screens, keeping Songti upright and clear while improving comfort at small sizes.
• Zhuque Fangsong: Its relaxed strokes are softer than traditional Songti and work especially well for casual reading.
• KingHwa OldSong: Has the feel of vintage printing and classical books. Its large text is easy on the eyes and suits historical or period novels.

Fonts for reading in English

• Literata: Designed by Google for reading on digital screens. Its flowing lines give text a soft quality that can ease reading pressure.
• Georgia: A classic serif designed for screen readability that remains clear and crisp at small sizes.

Chinese fonts and Latin characters

In general, Chinese fonts usually include Latin characters, while Latin-only fonts do not include Chinese. Most Chinese font files, such as TTF files, contain thousands of Chinese characters plus the basic ASCII set of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and punctuation. Fonts such as Arial, Times New Roman, and Courier New are designed for Latin writing systems. They need only dozens of basic characters and symbols, while Chinese requires tens of thousands of far more complex glyphs; adding them all would make a Latin font file extremely large.

When Times New Roman is selected in Word or on a web page and you enter Chinese, the system finds no matching glyph and triggers font fallback, using a default Chinese font such as SimSun or Microsoft YaHei. To keep the visual style consistent, pair Source Han Sans with Roboto as modern sans-serif faces, or Songti with Times New Roman as traditional serif faces.

Font file types and sizes

Font files come in several types, including .ttf, .ttc, and .woff:

• TrueType (.ttf)：Developed by Apple, it offers excellent compatibility and native support on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
• OpenType (.otf/.ttf)：Developed jointly by Microsoft and Adobe as an extension of TrueType. It supports richer character sets and advanced typography such as ligatures and small caps.
• Web Open Font Format (.woff/.woff2)：Designed for the web, it compresses and packages TrueType or OpenType fonts to reduce file size and speed up loading. WOFF2 is the newer format with better compression.

A font file’s size is mainly determined by the number and detail of its glyphs. More detailed and refined strokes take more space, but modern fonts are primarily vector-based and generally will not reach gigabyte scale. A typical Chinese font is around a dozen megabytes. Some reach tens or even hundreds of megabytes because they contain multiple weights and variants such as wide, narrow, thin, extended, and italic forms. Designers may create and export separate files for each weight, such as FontName-Regular.ttf and FontName-Bold.ttf. ISO/IEC 9541 divides font weight into nine levels, from W1, the thinnest, to W9, the heaviest. In practice, Regular (400) and Bold (700) are essential; a very small Chinese font file may contain no bold glyphs at all.

Because Chinese characters contain many tightly arranged strokes, simply making them heavier can cause overlaps and blur. Professional Chinese fonts therefore use carefully adjusted stroke endings and turns in purpose-designed bold versions, or true bold, to preserve balance and readability. When software cannot find a dedicated bold file, it may algorithmically expand the original outlines to simulate bold. This “synthetic bold” often looks rigid and causes strokes to overlap or blur. A professional bold, especially for Chinese, is not merely an emboldened regular face: the designer redraws stroke widths, turns, and structures for readability and appearance. Each bold file therefore contains extensive glyph data and is usually much larger than a single static Regular font.

Font rendering across operating systems

Operating systems differ not only in their default fonts but also in how they render the same font. Windows emphasizes clarity and readability, treating the screen as the final medium and prioritizing legibility and reading speed on low-resolution displays. Pixel-aligned hinting makes edges sharper even if it slightly alters the original outlines. macOS emphasizes faithful shapes and a print-like texture. Influenced by typographic tradition, Apple treats the screen as a print preview and prioritizes the original design. It focuses more on visual weight and overall gray value, accepting less pixel-level sharpness so enlarged small text remains smooth and natural.

These rendering strategies give text a visibly different character. On macOS it usually looks heavier, rounder, and fuller; on Windows it looks thinner and sharper. As Retina and high-DPI displays become common, hardware is narrowing the gap. macOS has replaced subpixel antialiasing with grayscale smoothing, while Windows uses less forced pixel alignment, so their appearance is gradually converging.

Font file inspector

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