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Fixing Inconsistent Stroke Width of Chinese Characters

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5.00/5 (3 votes)

Jan 29, 2018

CPOL
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Fixing Inconsistent Stroke Width of Chinese Characters

Windows has problems displaying Chinese font since Windows 98. And this inconsistent stroke width problem persists even today on Windows 10! Anyone using GDI/GDI+ technologies to display Chinese font, is likely to encounter this problem. I have seen this problem on posters and movie subtitles. This problem comes about using non-Chinese font such as Arial to display Chinese font. When the underlying font does not contain the glyph, Windows Uniscribe use a fallback mechanism to find the glyph from other font. Underneath, GDI/GDI+ make use of Uniscribe to display font. This may not be a problem on Chinese OS where the default font is Chinese type. The screenshot of Notepad reveals the problem.

The fix is to select a proper Chinese font to match language (Simplified/Traditional) to display Chinese characters. After changing to SimHei font, the stroke width is consistent.