Hanyi's new sans serif typeface 旗黑 seems pretty decent

[Hofmann]

...as an alternative to 蘭亭黑 or 雅黑.

 

http://www.ifont.cn/zuimei/qihei.html

 

Edit: I didn't even look at that last image carefully. Looks like the designer, 齊立, is the same guy behind 蘭亭黑.

[Takeshi]

Seems pretty nice.

 

I currently use Google Noto, more out of necessity than preference though. (I need a font that supports Simp, Trad, Japanese, and HKSCS all together.) I wonder if this font will work for me (they seem to have traditional at least). Is it a paid font? Where do you obtain it?

[Hofmann]

Taobao.

[mikelove]

Nice, but it seems like just as with English UI fonts we're converging on a rather boring 'flat' standard style; 蘭亭黑 and 雅黑 and Source Han Sans (= Noto CJK) and Apple's new 蘋方 and the 信黑體 we use in Pleco all look very similar to this. Granted it's a marked improvement over the STHeiti / Droid Sans Fallback / SimSun of old, but I think this particular style is pretty well covered now and I'd rather see the major CJK type designers working on something a bit more interesting.

[Hofmann]

I actually think this area is sorely lacking. There are a lot more high quality Ming typefaces than sans-serif, and certainly a lot more high quality Latin sans-serifs. Until this the only ones I'd consider using were just 蘭亭黑 and maybe 信黑 (it does some things I don't like). Source Han Sans doesn't make the cut. Personally I'm not sick of 蘭亭黑 yet, because although it may be the Chinese Helvetica, there isn't much else out there. Until we have a Chinese Futura, Avenir, Proxima Nova, and Gotham, I'll still feel like the basics haven't been covered.

[mikelove]

Sorry, should have clarified what I meant by 'style'; I'm not saying they should stop making new 黑體 fonts, I'd just like to see more variety - my complaint was over the relative same-ness of these recent releases even within the spectrum of possible 黑體.

 

(and I don't entirely disagree with you about 信黑, we picked it over 蘭亭黑 in spite of our long relationship with Founder because 蘭亭黑 doesn't play very well with English text sizing-wise, or at least didn't in our type design - I actually just bought a copy of 旗黑 to try out along with 蘋方)

[Hofmann]

Tell us what you think of them, will you?

[Hofmann]

Hey Mike, how did your evaluation go?

 

BTW, Type Is Beautiful wrote an article on 旗黑 a week ago.

[mikelove]

Still working on that - 旗黑 is looking nice on my computer but I haven't gotten around to trying it in a Pleco build yet. Also really liking 蘋方, though, and I'm strongly leaning towards letting our XinGothic license lapse and making that our default since it'll save both money and download space. (though on Android we'd probably still have to bundle in our own copy of Noto CJK in order to have something we could rely on if there wasn't a good system font)

[Hofmann]

Wouldn't there always be either Noto Sans or DroidSansFallback?

[mikelove]

Actually no, quite a few Android OEMs remove both of those and swap in alternate fonts with incomplete Chinese character set coverage. Or at the very least with wacky metrics that would screw up various aspects of our text formatting. And this doesn't even rank in the top 10 of Android-fragmentation-related annoyances...