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Some browsers apply the fonts listed in the user font preferences to the display of HTML Unicode text in Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean, depending on the setting of the lang/xml:lang attribute. Note that this is not specified in the HTML specification, and, of course, doesn't apply where explicit styling is applied.
See the results below for user agents tested. This section summarizes the results of those tests.
All UAs apart from Safari apply different fonts based on the language. Safari doesn't even provide a means to associate default fonts by language.
The default Han font (ie. with no language information) for Firefox, Mozilla, Navigator and IE6 is Japanese. For IE7 it is Simplified Chinese. For Opera it is a different font from any set (it looks like a Gothic font).
Of the UAs that substitute fonts, all but IE6 handle zh-Hans and zh-Hant as you would expect. IE6 applies the default font, which is Japanese.
Although Opera allows you to assign different fonts for the same Han characters while distinguishing between Simplified and Traditional forms, fonts can only be assigned to Hangul characters for Korean.
Firefox, Mozilla and Navigator allow you to set a different setting for Traditional Chinese in Taiwan and Hong Kong. They use the Taiwan font for zh-Hans and zh-TW. They use the Hong Kong font setting for zh-HK.
The following user agents were tested on Windows XP and Mac OS X.
The column titles indicate the language attribute declared for a paragraph containing Han text. The results show which font was applied. JA = Japanese, SC = Simplified Chinese, TC = Traditional Chinese, HK = Hong Kong, KO = Korean, X = a totally different font.
| none | zh | zh-Hans | zh-CN | zh-Hant | zh-TW | zh-HK | ja | ko | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IE 7 | 7.0 | SC | SC | SC | SC | TC | TC | SC | JA | KO |
| IE | 6.0 | JA | SC | JA | SC | JA | TC | SC | JA | KO |
| Firefox | 2.0.0.1 | JA | SC | SC | SC | TC | TC | HK | JA | KO |
| Mozilla | 1.7.12 | JA | SC | SC | SC | TC | TC | HK | JA | KO |
| Navigator | 8.0.4 | JA | SC | SC | SC | TC | TC | HK | JA | KO |
| Opera | 9.10 | ? | SC | SC | SC | TC | TC | TC | JA | ? |
| Safari | 2.0.3 | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X |
| none | zh | zh-Hans | zh-CN | zh-Hant | zh-TW | zh-HK | ja | ko | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Firefox 1.5.01 | JA | SC | SC | SC | TC | TC | HK | JA | KO |
| Firefox 1.0PR | JA | SC | SC | SC | TC | TC | TC | JA | KO |
| Firefox 0.9.2 | JA | SC | SC | SC | SC | TC | TC | JA | KO |
| Mozilla 1.7.2 | JA | SC | SC | SC | SC | TC | TC | JA | KO |
| Navigator 7.1 | X | SC | SC | SC | SC | TC | SC | JA | KO |
| Opera 8.54 | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X |
| Opera 7.54 | KO | KO | KO | KO | KO | KO | KO | KO | KO |
| IE 5.2 (Mac) | TC | TC | TC | SC | TC | TC | TC | JA | KO |
| Safari 1.03 | JA | JA | JA | JA | JA | JA | JA | JA | JA |
Tell us what you think (English).
Content first published 2004-07-13. Last substantive update 2007-02-14 19:12 GMT. This version 2007-02-14 19:12 GMT
For the history of document changes, search for results-lang-and-cjk-font in the i18n blog.
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