The US version of Windows Vista includes the following Chinese fonts:

* The highlighted fonts will come up by default when you start typing: PMingLiU for Taiwan keyboards, SimSun for PRC keyboards. This can be changed in the current document via your font menu, or permanently in the default settings for the system or your application.

** Keyboards:
PRC = Supported by "Chinese (PRC)" keyboards and their IMEs, including MSPY.
Taiwan = Supported by "Chinese (Taiwan)" keyboards and their IMEs, including MS New Phonetic.

***"Proportional" vs. "monospaced" refers only to the Western characters and spaces included in these fonts.

In your font menu you should also find Chinese minority language fonts for Yi (Yi Baiti), Tibetan (Microsoft Himalaya), Uighur (Microsoft Uighur) and Mongolian (Mongolian Baiti). I am not planning to cover these in detail here.

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The newest Chinese fonts in Vista are "Microsoft JhengHei" and "Microsoft YaHei", developed by Hong Kong's Dynacomware and the PRC's Founder respectively. These take advantage of the latest ClearType display technology. Although the low-resolution reproduction above may not do them justice, they both look great on paper. The other fonts, even if they are new to Vista, have been available separately in one form or another for quite some time. Some are TrueType; most are bitmapped.

There are also a vast number of free and inexpensive third-party fonts you can add to your system - and some very expensive fonts as well. I list a few sources of free fonts in the left column on this page. If you are working in education, I highly recommend the North American font set produced by DynaComWare, which includes pinyin and zhuyin ruby fonts. Stay away from MS Word's "Phonetic Guide" ruby feature unless you really really like being frustrated. I have more info on those DynaComWare ruby fonts and also on Word's Phonetic Guide here.

In addition to my links to free font downloads in the left column on this page, I will do periodic surveys of third-party fonts and other software as time allows. Also, if you just want to display pinyin with tone marks, I have an MS Word macro for you, and information on which fonts can do this. See the MS Word pinyin macro page.

But back to the table above: Vista's default Chinese fonts are still the Song fonts listed above, SimSum and PMingLiU. Songti is the standard Chinese printing typeface, named after the Song dynasty when it may have originated. The names of these particular fonts are confusing because Microsoft bought the simplified and traditional fonts from two different vendors. "Xin"/"New" is proportional in one set but monospaced in the other. For most purposes you will want to use the default proportional Song fonts, SimSun and PMingLiU.

Confused about "proportional" vs. "monospaced"? This refers only to the Western characters and Western spaces contained in each font, and does not affect the Chinese characters themselves. Example of proportional English fonts you may be familiar with are Times and Arial. A monospaced, or non-proportional font, would be old versions of Courier, in which every letter takes up the same amount of space from side-to-side just like the output of a typewriter. (Too bad Dan Rather didn't read this paragraph..)