Simplified Chinese language font

Question

Can someone recommend a Simplified Chinese language font that will work well in XPP and also distill with Acrobat?

Laurie Hagar (former member) · Accepted Answer

Rich, 
 
The question is one of price (your budget) and the size of the font (there are size limitations in Acrobat Distiller itself). XPP should be able to handle any Simplified Chinese font, and I believe that XPP’s built-in Ghostscript-to-PDF and XPP’s direct-to-PDF could distill them. But you might have other reasons why these last two options are not sufficient. 
 
I have a few simplified Chinese fonts, but I honestly don’t know where they came from. But the size varies from 1700 KB to 4500 KB, and I’m pretty sure that’s within the realm of Acrobat’s capabilities. 
 
As for price, it looks like font vendors have really changed their pricing structures in the past couple of years, based on how one is using the font. Linotype.com has SC fonts, but they seem to be around $500 (I think that entitles you to use it on 5 computers). Fonts.com also has a Simplified Chinese font, but it has a different pricing structure. 
 
At any rate, I would advise against the free Chinese fonts you might found out there on the internet. I’ve always had bad luck with those. 
 
I know that some of the members on this Forum are using SC. They will be the best expert opinions. But I think your budget could be an issue. 
 
- Laurie

Jonathan Dagresta · Answer

Hi Rich, 
 Since you mention distilling with Acrobat is in your workflow, one caveat that I will add to what Laurie said is that you will want to avoid the TTF font format if the font has 16,000+ characters. Acrobat will not be able to distill the PS file created from XPP (if the font is embedded). 
 GS (Ghostscript) can successfully distill such "large" fonts, but another caveat even with using GS (Ghostscript) to distill is that fonts of the TTF format get "rasterized" by GS distilling and so text in those fonts is not searchable nor selectable (i.e. Copy/Paste won't work). 
 Our newer Direct to PDF product seems able to generally handle TTF format fonts properly, including the "large" ones. 
 As far as I know, we've not seen any of these types of "caveats" with Type 1 or OTF format fonts.

XPP > XPP

Simplified Chinese language font