Chinese Fonts in High Sierra
TenThousandThings
High Sierra supports Unicode 9.0 (2016), which means it supports CJK up to Extension E. Unicode 10.0 (2017) is the current version and includes CJK Extension F.
Ken Lunde has updated his list of reasons for developers to support code points beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP):
http://blogs.adobe.com/CCJKType/files/2017/12/beyond-bmp-top10-2017.pdf
Extension E completes Unicode support for the PRC standard 通用规范汉字表 published in 2013. This is an official list of standard simplified forms for a set of 8,105 commonly-used characters. They are arranged on three levels, of 3,500, 3,000, and 1,605 characters respectively. 196 of these are outside of the BMP, with 108 in Extension E — the few that I checked in Extension E were simplified forms of established but previously unsimplified characters.
http://www.gov.cn/gzdt/att/att/site1/20130819/tygfhzb.pdf
One of the big questions for Unicode going forward is what to do with what are called “derived” simplifications. I could be wrong, but I think the line for encoding simplified characters is currently drawn at this 2013 PRC standard, and there is debate about what to do beyond that. There are dictionaries that show the correct derivations, and it seems inevitable that more and more of these “derived simplified characters” (DSC) will find their way into print. I’m sure plenty of them already have. There is a proposal to reserve a single, dedicated variation selector for DSC, basically providing a font-based solution. I don’t know if it’s been rejected or what. Here’s the initial proposal:
http://appsrv.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~irg/irg/irg49/IRGN2274UsingE01EF.pdf
PingFang SC contains all of the 通用规范汉字表 simplifications. PingFang itself contains 48,902 glyphs (for its SC, TC, and HK fonts), so there is room for more (maximum glyph count is 65,535), but to incorporate DSC for all the traditional Chinese characters currently in PingFang would be a close thing. It might or might not fit, but regardless there would be little or no room for the future.
The PingFang font set (in six weights) was developed by Dynacomware Shanghai and Apple (working together) in 2015. It’s the only Chinese font included with High Sierra that supports this 2013 standard, or any characters beyond Extension B.
That said, many of the Chinese fonts that come with High Sierra do support significant numbers of traditional characters from Extension B. My knowledge is out of date, so I’m not sure what standards are being supported:
Baoli SC and TC
Heiti SC and TC (two weights)
Kaiti SC and TC (three weights)
Libian SC and TC
Songti SC and TC (three weights)
Weibei SC and TC
Xingkai SC and TC (two weights)
Yuanti SC and TC (three weights)
There’s an extended group of TC fonts that also support a lot of Extension B characters. Again, my knowledge is out of date, so I’m not sure what CNS (Taiwan) standard is being supported:
Hannotate TC (two weights)
HanziPen TC (two weights)
Lingwai TC
Yuppy TC
Hiragino Sans CNS (two weights)
The SC fonts for this second group don’t contain characters beyond the BMP. They are basically GB18030-2000 fonts, like Hiragino Sans GB. GB108030-2000 is the mandatory minimum for SC fonts as of 2006.
STHeiti, STSong, and STKaiti are more complicated and they are included in the font “assets” provided by Apple for High Sierra, but they are replaced by Heiti, Kaiti, and Songti above, so I won’t discuss them here. STFangsong does not have a replacement, and it is also GB18030-2000.
NOTES:
[1] While you can glean all of this information using Font Book in conjunction with the Character Viewer in High Sierra (named “Emoji & Symbols” in the Finder menus even when you have it set to “Character Viewer”), I used the $10 utility “Ultra Character Map” to make the above relatively easy. The new UI takes a little getting used to, but this is the current iteration of an old Mac OS X utility, and it works reasonably well. The only feature request I’d like to make is for there to be a way to view a given font’s particular character set by Unicode block. Keep in mind that it is a font viewer, not a font manager. Plays nice with Font Book.
[2] The discussion above is just about the fonts supplied by Apple. Once I put other fonts on this computer it will be harder to see what Apple’s doing. For example, once I install the comprehensive Google Noto CJK or Adobe Source Han fonts (now available in both sans and serif), all of the code points in Ultra Character Map will be filled in with glyphs. Onward!
[3] Finally, a note on where these fonts are stored. Some are in the System/Library/Fonts folder and the Library/Fonts folder, but all of the non-essential ones are in System/Library/Assets/com_apple_MobileAsset_Font4 folder.