{"id":11927,"date":"2022-07-14T14:49:46","date_gmt":"2022-07-14T14:49:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.1stopasia.com\/blog\/?p=11927"},"modified":"2023-11-15T11:21:34","modified_gmt":"2023-11-15T11:21:34","slug":"loading-chinese-fonts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.1stopasia.com\/blog\/loading-chinese-fonts\/","title":{"rendered":"Loading Chinese Fonts on Your Multilingual Website"},"content":{"rendered":"

Loading Chinese fonts can be an overwhelming task, however, using your client\u2019s native language is detrimental to being successful in foreign markets. We\u2019ve discussed the topic already and you can read more about that here<\/a>. Today we will take a deep dive into the technical issues on the way to having your content reach your Chinese audience in the best way possible and in particular loading Chinese fonts.<\/p>\n

The Problem With Loading Chinese Fonts<\/h2>\n

If you\u2019ve never been faced with the task of having a Chinese version of your website, you\u2019d probably wonder what\u2019s the fuss all about, after all, Chinese is a language like every other language, right? Right? Let me explain where the issue of loading Chinese fonts all stems from. Chinese has thousands of characters which means a font file would be considerably larger than a Latin font file. We are speaking megabytes (MB) instead of mere kilobytes (KB) here. In today\u2019s world, loading speed is one of the most important technical requirements for a website. We can\u2019t afford to make the user wait 10 seconds or more just so they can see the text on our website. They will most probably think something is wrong and just move on to the competitor\u2019s website.<\/p>\n

The Way Out<\/h2>\n

So the first step to achieving a better loading time with Chinese is generating a font file that contains only the characters your website uses (instead of the whole lot of them). There are different tools out there that would do that for you. And if you\u2019re targeting a Chinese-speaking audience outside of China – like the large Mandarin-speaking and Cantonese-speaking communities in the US for example (each with more than 400,000 speakers as of 2010) – the easiest way is to go to Adobe Typekit<\/a>. It\u2019s a win-win because you get a piece of code you paste on your website and users will have no issue loading Chinese fonts directly from Adobe when they visit your website.<\/p>\n

Dynamic Subsetting<\/h2>\n

Thankfully we live in a world where this \u201cmagic\u201d exists. When the script you added to your website loads in the user\u2019s browser, it will detect the character usage of your page and request a dynamic subset for the glyphs needed. This means the font file to download will be as small as possible. Great, right?<\/p>\n

China<\/h2>\n

Things are significantly more complicated if your target audience is located in mainland China. There\u2019s this thing developers jokingly call The Great Firewall of China<\/i> that basically requires you to have your fonts hosted somewhere in China if you want a reasonable loading time. The good news is today that is no longer such a tremendous obstacle as it used to be.<\/p>\n

Here I\u2019ll mention two Eastern-based alternatives to Adobe\u2019s Typekit:<\/p>\n