New Pan-CJK Font Release: Source Han Sans 2.0

Image source: Adobe / Ken Lunde.

We are delighted to announce the availability of Source Han Sans version 2.0, a major update to the open source Pan-CJK typeface family that we first released in 2014 in collaboration with Google (who brand the fonts under the name Noto Sans CJK).

Complete details about the family, including technical notes and details of the update, can be found in the release notes on GitHub. Some of the more noteworthy changes and enhancements are:

• Working with our new design partner, Arphic Technology, we added a second flavor of Traditional Chinese to provide support for Hong Kong and the HKSCS-2016 standard, and made a number of adjustments to other Chinese glyphs. (The latest release of Adobe InDesign also supports language tagging for Hong Kong, making these fonts more useful.) This fifth major East Asian language of the Source Han Sans family increased the total number of font resources by 16, from 72 to 88.

The illustration above shows the traditional (first four lines) and simplified (fifth line) forms of the ideograph biáng as it appears in each of the seven weights of Source Han Sans. The traditional form requires four distinct glyphs to accommodate the five supported languages.

• The Unified Repertoire and Ordering (URO) block of CJK Unified Ideographs is complete up through Unicode Version 11.0 (U+9FEF).
• Responding to feedback from experts, Ryoko Nishizuka, Adobe’s chief type designer and overall design lead for the Source Han projects, took on the challenge of learning to design for a new script, and substantially improved the glyphs, tone marks, and typographic support for Bopomofo — the phonetic transliteration system used in Taiwan and for some Chinese dialects.

A comparison of the bopomofo glyphs from the original Source Han Sans (in blue) to this update (in black) illustrates how thoroughly each of them were revised.

• As with Source Han Serif, the regular weight fonts are now style-linked to the bold weights. This means that the bold weight may not appear in the font menu, particularly when using applications that support style linking as a way to make text bold.

All the fonts in this new Source Han Sans version are available for download on GitHub, and a subset is available for desktop and web use through Adobe Fonts. Google’s own version of this font under the name Noto Sans CJK will soon be available as part of their Noto Pan-Unicode font family.

Since there are a number of small changes throughout the family, we encourage any Adobe Fonts users who have worked with the fonts previously to reactivate them once again and make sure the fonts on their system are up to date.