This project is superseded by Chiron Hei HK, and will no longer be maintained. Check out the Chiron Font website (in Chinese) for the details behind this move.
TL;DR: Chiron Sans HK + Source Sans 3 = Chiron Sans HK Pro
Chiron Sans HK Pro (昭源黑體 Pro) is a sans-serif CJK typeface. Build upon Chiron Sans HK (昭源黑體), it incorporates the entire character set found in Source Sans Pro.
Chiron Sans HK is modified from the Traditional Chinese – Hong Kong variant of Source Han Sans. It aims to provide a modern, region-agnostic glyph set adopting the “written” style that is similar to the prevailing, usually commercial, typefaces such that it is suitable for use in a Traditional Chinese environment. While the Latin, Latin-like, Greek, and Cyrillic (LGC) glyphs of Source Han Sans (and thus Chiron Sans HK, they are mostly identical in terms of non-ideographic characters) are derived from Source Sans Pro, it has a fairly limited coverage due to the technical limitation on the maximum number of glyphs allowed in a single font file. Not much space can be reserved for non-CJK characters because of the multi-language and pan-CJK nature of Source Han Sans. Thus, it is possible for characters covered by Source Sans Pro to be found missing in Source Han Sans, as shown in the following sample:
Unfortunately, using Source Sans Pro as a fallback to Source Han Sans is not a solution. This is because the LGC glyphs in Source Sans Pro have been manipulated to harmonize with the other parts of Source Han Sans before integration. The glyphs are scaled and interpolated differently, so mixing the two fonts will not yield any good result:
As Chiron Sans HK aims to provide an opinionated version of CJK Ideographs via remapping and redesigning of existing glyphs, non-default CJK glyphs in the font can be removed. This results in around 16,900 glyph spaces (CIDs) being freed up for other uses. Chiron Sans HK Pro takes this opportunity to include the entire glyph set of Source Sans Pro into it.
Chiron Sans HK Pro offers the following features:
- The following features found in Chiron Sans HK are included:
- More than 2,700 remapped ideographs.
- More than 1,600 redesigned ideographs.
- More than 1,000 ideographs uncovered by the original Source Han Sans.
- The proportional variant of U+2018 (‘), U+2019 (’), U+201C (“) and U+201D (”) are served by default.
halt,vhal,palt, andvpalinstructions for full-width punctuations have been removed.
- The entire character set covered by the latest version of Source Sans Pro (version 3).
- OpenType features in the original Source Sans Pro font.
Installable font resources can be found in the build/ directory. It contains the OpenType/CFF (OTF) font resources in 7 weights and a OpenType/CFF2 variable font version for desktop use. There is also a webfont build for use on websites.
Note that the ExtraLight instance of the font has been renamed to ExtraLt to circumvent the font menu name character limit on Windows.
This section provides some information on the integration of Source Sans Pro's glyph set into Chiron Sans HK to produce Chiron Sans HK Pro. Note that the situation in Chiron Sans HK also applies to its upstream, Source Han Sans.
Just like Source Han Sans, the LGC glyphs from Source Sans Pro have been manipulated so that they can be adapted for use in Chiron Sans HK Pro. However, the scaling and interpolation ratio are different from that of Source Han Sans.
First, I do not know the exact configuration that is used to build the customized Source Sans Pro for use in Source Han Sans, and due to the difference of the integration workflow I probably cannot reproduce the exact settings. Second, for each weight I have intentionally picked a smaller scaling ratio than that is adopted by Source Han Sans.
This means that the building process of Chiron Sans HK Pro is not only about filling the missing glyphs with those found in Source Sans Pro. It also replaces existing LGC glyphs that already exist in Chiron Sans HK with those in the processed Source Sans Pro glyph set.
Therefore, the metrics of the LGC characters in Chiron Sans HK Pro are different from Chiron Sans HK and Source Han Sans. One should not see Chiron Sans HK Pro as a drop-in replacement of Chiron Sans HK or Source Han Sans.
Source Sans Pro is very rich in OpenType features. This includes alternate letterforms and rules that are essential for correct rendering of characters. These have been preseved in Chiron Sans HK Pro with best effort. They supercedes the same features defined in the Chiron Sans HK or Source Han Sans.
While it is mentioned that existing LGC glyphs in Chiron Sans HK Pro are replaced by those in Source Sans Pro, special cases do exist. A small number of characters, which are mostly symbols like ▲, ♠, ←, etc., are proportional in Source Sans Pro but appear full-width in Chiron Sans HK or Source Han Sans because people using a Chinese typeface would mostly prefer these glyphs be rendered in full-width. For these glyphs it would be inappropriate to blindly replacing them with the proportional version. Thus the following arrangements:
For the following characters, the full-width version in Chiron Sans HK will be served as the default. Their corresponding proportional version from Source Sans Pro can still be accessed via language-tagging (locl feature) or through OpenType's Stylistic Set (ss11) / Character Variants (cv20) features.
←, ↑, →, ↓, ↖, ↗, ↘, ↙, ⇐, ⇒, ↔, ↕, ●, ○, ■, □, ◆, ▲, △, ▶, ▷, ▼, ▽, ◀, ◁, ◉, ♥, ♣, ♦, ♠, ♀, ♁, ♂
For the following characters, the proportional version in Source Sans Pro will be served as the default. The full-width version found in Chiron Sans HK can be accessed via OpenType's Stylistic Set (ss12) / Character Variants (cv21) features.
·, •, ×, ÷, ◦, ▪, ▫, †, ‡, §, ¶, ‖, ∕, ≤, ≥, ±, ≠, ≈, ∩, ∟, ∞, ‵, √, ∀, ∃, ∶, ∷, ∑, ∏, ℅.
Source Han Sans offers an alternate set of punctuations and digits that is better suited for CJK typesetting. For numeric characters U+0030 (0) to U+0039 (9), the CJK-optimized version is served by default, and the corresponding Western forms can be activated by language tagging (locl feature). The CJK-optimized version is not available in Source Sans Pro.
On the other hand, in Source Sans Pro, the height of numerals are a bit lower than that of capital letters by default. Cap-height numerals can be accessed via OpenType's case feature.
In Chiron Sans HK Pro, the cap-height version becomes the default and is always served. In addition, the locl feature to switch between CJK-optimized and Western forms in Source Han Sans / Chiron Sans HK is removed.
The following changes are applied for my personal preference:
- The single storey version of U+0067 (g) has been made the default form, and the original double storey U+0067 (g) is provided as an alternate form through
ss04/cv03. - The foot of U+0031 (1) has been removed.
- The em-centered versions of U+203C (‼), U+2047 (⁇), U+2048 (⁈) and U+2049 (⁉) have been modified such that they now occupy the full-em width, and are served as default. Proportional forms from Source Sans Pro can be accessed via Opentype feature
ss11orcv20. - For U+2E3A (⸺) and U+2E3B (⸻), the Western version will be served by default in Source Han Sans and Chiron Sans HK, and the CJK-optimized glyphs can only be accessed via language tagging. Certain applications (like Microsoft Word) does not support language tagging for these codepoints very well. In Chiron Sans HK Pro, the CJK-optimized version becomes the default, and their corresponding Western form can be accessed via Opentype feature
ss11orcv20.
Chiron Sans HK Pro is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. The full text of the license is available at https://scripts.sil.org/OFL_web.