Support For SC ( Simplified Chinese )

[FabianNicola]

Hey! Anyone knows when support for IBMPlexSans Simplified Chinese will be available ? I see that support for Traditional Chinese is already in place. When is SC supposed to come out?

[mjabbink]

@FabianNicola We’re hoping Q3, but latest Q4 2024.

[BobH-Official]

@mjabbink I have some questions, in the first Chinese release, will all characters be in the Chinese style or just copy from the Japanese if they were already there?
For example, this character(燹 U+71F9), in this issue, #580. It has small different at the bottom part (火).

And will there only be Chinese TC and Chinese SC release, instead of Chinese TC (Taiwan), Chinese TC (Hong Kong) and Chinese SC (China)?

[NightFurySL2001]

@BobH-Official

1. The dot difference of 火 does not exists in printing fonts (eg songti/heiti) for Chinese. If you reference 《通用规范汉字表》, you will see that the left dot of 火 indeed goes from top right to botton left (like 丿), which mean for this particular character SC and JP are expected to share the same glyph.
2. The Traditional Chinese community strong vote against separating TC (Taiwan Education) and TC (Hong Kong Education/Reference Glyphs). They are only suitable for educational usage, and in a grotesque font design like IBM Plex, the traditional printing form (旧字形) is more matching the intended design. See Orthography used for Plex Sans TC #346 for more information on discussion.

[BobH-Official]

@NightFurySL2001 Thank you for the response.

I just checked out 《通用规范汉字表》, it is good to know that there are more characters that can be shared.

It is good to know that there will be only one TC Glyphs and using 旧字形/雕版体. 雕版体 looks far better than 教育体, but there haven't been many open source fonts for it (maybe 一點明體 is the only one, but it is in Serif). However, there seems to be no official standard for 旧字体, is this https://github.com/ichitenfont/inheritedglyphs used as the official reference?

And another question, will that be a unified Chinese font, but display SC and TC glyphs based on font-feature-settings, for example ss01 to switch between them. This may be useful for website that provided SC and TC i18n.

[BoldMonday]

And another question, will that be a unified Chinese font, but display SC and TC glyphs based on font-feature-settings, for example ss01 to switch between them. This may be useful for website that provided SC and TC i18n.

There will be separate releases for Plex Sans TC and Plex Sans SC.