Monday 12 January 2015

Free Chinese fonts for commercial use


Yes, my friend downloaded her free Chinese fonts.  But it was not easy to get high quality ones.  Maybe because Chinese fonts are difficult to create?  Then, if anyone made the fonts, he or she may want to sell them for profit.

This maybe the same reason why we have so many free English fonts to choose from.  It will take less time to design 26 alphabets than thousands of Chinese characters.

For our search, we found out that it is better to search for "CJK fonts", i.e. Chinese, Japanese and Korean fonts, even we only need free Chinese fonts for commercial use.

The best link is: List of CJK fonts From Wikipedia. 

Since my friend only want traditional Chinese fonts, she can only use free fonts from Taiwan or Hong Kong.

The free one from Hong Kong Government is only for personal use.  So, we didn't download it.  But you can download it from this bilingual Chinese and English site, if it is for non-commercial use.

Then, there are some from Taiwan.

The most famous fonts among Chinese, "Arphic fonts", are from Arphic Technology Co., Ltd.  This company donated more than 4 font styles for public use.  Many sites listed the fonts as free for personal and commercial use.  But my friend found a Chinese new release from Arphic and it clearly indicated that the fonts are for non-commercial use. 

The other famous fonts "H.T.Wang Free Fonts" are created by professor Hann-Tzong Wang from Taiwan.  His fonts are released under GNU GPL license.   So, we can use the fonts for our commercial works.  But Arphic Technology Co., Ltd claimed that professor Wang's fonts are very similar to theirs.  And Arphic may take this issue to court.  Because of this, some sites stopped to distribute his fonts.  Well, even thought my friend loves the Han Wang Yan Kai calligraphy font, she worries about the lawsuit and decided not to download the fonts.

"cwTeX Chinese fonts" is another one we can find from free fonts sites.  The fonts are made by Tsong-Min Wu, Tsong-Huey Wu and Edward G.J. Lee.  We can download some font styles from Google fonts Early Access.  Similar to the situation of "H.T.Wang Free Fonts", Arphic Technology Co., Ltd also has claims of copyright infringement with "cwTeX Chinese fonts".  This time it is for its Bold Sans-serif font style.

Within "cwTeX Chinese fonts", my friend loves cwTeXKai (Chinese_traditional) font style.  She is still thinking about downloading it.  Since Google fonts Early Access doesn't include cwTeX Bold Sans-serif,  does this mean cwTeXKai (Chinese_traditional) is okay for my friend to download?  If my friend uses this font style for her videos, she won't have to worry about any copyright infringement claims from Arphic, right?  To download or not to download: that is the question. 

Better safe than sorry.  My friend downloaded the newest version of Noto Sans CJKTC (Traditional Chinese) from Google Noto Fonts.  Noto Sans CJK, which is created by Google and Adobe, is released under Apache License, Version 2.0.   So, the fonts are good for commercial use.

Now, my friend got her free Chinese fonts for commercial use.  Another mission Accomplished !!! 


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My mum's Monday TV schedule - Jan 2015 


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Today is a great day. I can, and I did.

 

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