# Chinese font support

**URL:** <https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/chinese-font-support/10794>\
**Category:** Ignition\
**Created:** [November 16, 2015, 4:24pm UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/chinese-font-support/10794 "2015-11-16T16:24:21Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Didi71](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/46a35a/32.png) [@Didi71](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/u/Didi71)\
**Post date:** [November 16, 2015, 4:24pm UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/chinese-font-support/10794/1 "2015-11-16T16:24:21Z")

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Hello everybody.

It seem that only the “Dialog” font have a full support for chinese characters.  
Most of the others font (for example Segoe UI) shows empty rectangles instead the ideograms.  
This happens on Windows 7 64 and Ignition version 7.7.4.  
The gateway runs onto a Windows Server 2008 R2.

Does someone have one opinion about?

Thanks in advance.

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**Author:** ![Kevin.Herron](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/inductiveautomation/user_avatar/forum.inductiveautomation.com/kevin.herron/32/7259_2.png) [@Kevin.Herron](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/u/Kevin.Herron)\
**Post date:** [November 16, 2015, 4:27pm UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/chinese-font-support/10794/2 "2015-11-16T16:27:08Z")

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Find a font that has full support for Chinese characters then?

Segoe UI does not have support, by design: [msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/librar ... 42483.aspx](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dn742483.aspx)

> [@](#):
>
> Segoe UI includes Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Arabic characters. There are new fonts, also optimized for ClearType, created for other character sets and uses. These include Meiryo for Japanese, Malgun Gothic for Korean, Microsoft JhengHei for Chinese (Traditional), Microsoft YaHei for Chinese (Simplified), Gisha for Hebrew, and Leelawadee for Thai, and the ClearType Collection fonts designed for document use.

See if you can find Microsoft JhengHei or YaHei?

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**Author:** ![KathyApplebaum](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/inductiveautomation/user_avatar/forum.inductiveautomation.com/kathyapplebaum/32/7261_2.png) [@KathyApplebaum](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/u/KathyApplebaum)\
**Post date:** [November 16, 2015, 5:03pm UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/chinese-font-support/10794/3 "2015-11-16T17:03:25Z")

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To add more technical detail for those who care…

The empty rectangle is because the font has no idea how to display the character it’s being asked to display. This is a function of the font, not Ignition or Java.

You might ask why fonts will leave out whole chunks of Unicode characters, like Chinese? There’s several reasons. One is that there’s over 100k possible characters in Unicode, but most fonts are limited to 65k characters, so some will have to be left out. Another reason is size – having plain, bold and italic versions of 65k characters leads to awfully big font files, and users would complain. And the last reason is that someone who can design a lovely font for English characters probably can’t design Arabic or Chinese characters with the same skill, and vice versa. So fonts tend to specialize in a smaller range of characters, leaving the user to choose another font when needed.

The tl;dr version is, like Kevin said, install a font that handles the character set you want and use that font. We’ve tried to make the font user selectable in as many places as possible in the Client from 7.7 on.