[Tex/LaTex] How to find out what Chinese fonts are installed with the MacTeX installation

Question

I am using a Mac and have installed the MacTeX-2014 distribution. I'd like to try to use the CJK package with regular pdflatex but there is no documentation for what Chinese fonts are included with this distribution (or TeX Live that MacTeX is based on).

The MacTex directory structure is a bit of a mystery to me. How can I discover what Chinese fonts are installed with this distribution, either by looking at the files, or perhaps there is documentation available that I have not found?

Answer 1

You don't alway use the font installed with TeX Live. You can use any font you have if you use XeTeX or LuaTeX. It is preferred to use xeCJK package for Chinese and you don't need to worry about what fonts are installed with TeX distribution.

---

For Chinese, there are only these fonts preinstalled in TeX Live (MacTeX):

1. For pdfLaTeX (with CJK bundle), only Arphic fonts are provided. Say, the arphic package in TeX Live.

   Two CJK font families are available for Simplified Chinese, gbsn and gkai. And two other CJK font families are available for Traditional Chinese, bsmi and bkai.

   But do not use these fonts if you have other choices.

   

   % !TEX encoding = UTF-8
   % !TEX program = pdflatex
   \documentclass{article}
   \usepackage{CJKutf8}
   
   \begin{document}
   % We always use CJK package globally to prevent some bugs.
   \begin{CJK}{UTF8}{gbsn}
   
   {\CJKfamily{gbsn}
   文鼎简报宋：中国字体}
   
   {\CJKfamily{gkai}
   文鼎简中楷：中国字体}
   
   {\CJKfamily{bsmi}
   文鼎细上海宋：中國字體}
   
   {\CJKfamily{bkai}
   文鼎中楷：中國字體}
   
   \texttt{http://www.arphic.com/cn/news/epaper/agent/201004/news-1.html}
   
   \clearpage\end{CJK}
   \end{document}
   

2. For XeLaTeX (with xeCJK) or LuaLaTeX (with luatexja-fontspec), you can use any Chinese font installed in the Mac OS X system. Anyway, there are also four Fandol fonts for Simplified Chinese installed in TeX Live. See the fandol package in TeX Live.

   

   % !TEX encoding = UTF-8
   % !TEX program = xelatex
   \documentclass{article}
   \usepackage{xeCJK}
   \setCJKmainfont[BoldFont=FandolSong-Bold.otf]{FandolSong-Regular.otf}
   \setCJKsansfont[BoldFont=FandolHei-Bold.otf]{FandolHei-Regular.otf}
   \setCJKmonofont{FandolFang-Regular.otf}
   \newCJKfontfamily\kaiti{FandolKai-Regular.otf}
   
   \begin{document}
   
   饭朵宋体；\textbf{饭朵宋体}
   
   \textsf{饭朵黑体；\textbf{饭朵黑体}}
   
   \texttt{饭朵仿宋体}
   
   {\kaiti 饭朵楷体}
   
   {\CJKfontspec{Hiragino Sans GB W3.otf}
   冬青黑体 or any other font installed in your system.}
   
   \end{document}