FAQ: Chinese Website Fonts & Character Sets
Choose one basic Chinese font, and the Unicode UTF-8 charset
Q: What fonts and character set should I use in a Chinese language web page?
Chinese Fonts:
Chinese websites usually specify one very basic font in their style sheet, if any, and let site visitors' browsers decide what to display from there based on whatever fonts are installed on the visitors' systems. Size, bold and color are applied to the same font via styles as well. Any other fonts or more elaborate styling are in images, not in text.
Most Simplified Chinese websites specify the Song font in their style sheet, in Chinese: "宋体". That single font name represents a whole family or range of fonts, and no fallback font names are necessary. Usually a Windows system will use the SimSun font to display those characters. Other operating systems use their own Song fonts, and this is not a problem.
Example: font-family:"宋体";
Example: font:normal 12px/180% "宋体";
Some Traditional Chinese websites specify the general Song (宋體) font family as well. Most specifically name a Song font from Microsoft, 新細明體, and/or its predecessor 細明體, often but not always using their English font names, "PMingLiU" and "MingLiU". Although PMingLiU and MingLiU are not on Macs and most other operating systems, when those systems automatically choose their own fallback the layout is not affected. But because MingLiU does not offer proportional Western characters, even 100% Chinese sites using MingLiU often also specify a Western font family to ensure that numbers and letters look their best, as in the third example below.
Example: font-family:"宋體";
Example: font-family:"PMingLiU, MingLiU";
Example: font-family:"細明體", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
Note it is often useful to place "Arial Unicode MS" or "Lucida Sans Unicode" at the beginning of a Western font list, as they include letters with diacritics (tone marks) and other useful characters. That way so you don't have to worry about what version of Arial or Lucida Sans visitors have.
There are exceptions to this rule, such the elaborate zdic.net  Chinese dictionary site, which includes ancient, classical and some highly obscure characters. On some pages there, in Windows XP you may see a dialog box asking if you want to temporarily download additional fonts. Of course not every system or user will allow that download. Unless you're doing something really unique and artful, and simply can't live without a particular font, I wouldn't even consider creating a situation like that for your site visitors. At that point it's best to use images or other multimedia.
All of the above assumes that your vistors have any Chinese at all on their systems. Chinese is an option that users outside East Asia must install on Windows XP and certain smart phones (some Blackberry, all Nokia S60), but Vista, Win7, Ubuntu, Macintosh, iOS and almost all Android systems can always display Chinese.
Character set:
In the <head> of your web pages, do not specify a Western character set, as in "charset=ISO-8859-1". You must use a character set that includes Chinese.
Many mainland China websites specify their charset as "GB2312", while some Taiwan sites specify "big5", but any Chinese language site that is outward-facing or global uses the Unicode charset "utf-8". I recommend that you use UTF-8 as well. In fact the page you're reading right now contains the following tag:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8">
More information:
Chinese fonts included with Windows 7
Chinese fonts included with Windows Vista
Chinese fonts included with Windows XP
Chinese fonts included with Ubuntu Linux 10 & 11
Chinese support in other operating systems
Chinese encoding standards: Big 5, GB2312, and more
OK? Please feel free to contact me if you require further clarification, or if you have any comments or suggestions.
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