SimSun (新宋体 in Chinese) is a typeface designed for typesetting the Chinese language using the Simplified Chinese script. It is in the Song or Ming style (serif), with high contrast between thick and thin strokes, especially between thick vertical strokes and thin horizontal strokes, and with triangular marks or ticks at the ends of many of the strokes. SimSun is very popular and widely used; with its light, readable appearance, it has been described as “the Times New Roman of Simplified Chinese,” for its ubiquity in computer documents.
SimSun was designed by Zhongyi Electronic Co. in 2001. It has only one weight, with no italic style, but three variations: SimSun, NSimSun, and SimSun-ExtB. In addition to Simplified Chinese characters, SimSum and NSimSun include Japanese hiragana and katakana, bopomofo, numerous symbols, and capitals and lowercase letters for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets. SimSun-ExtB includes the Latin alphabet and a greatly expanded set of rare and historic CJK ideographs for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. The N version is identical to the original but with an internal flag identifying it as monospaced.
