BabelStone Han v. 16.0.2 is a free Unicode CJK font with over 60,000 Han characters (hanzi, kanji, hanja), and 64,736 Unicode characters in total. It is a Song/Ming style (宋体/明體) font, with glyphs modelled on the official character forms used in the People's Republic of China, and is primarily intended for writing Modern Standard Chinese, Classical Chinese, and various Sinitic languages and dialects. However, it also includes a large number of characters used for Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese (Chữ Nôm), and Zhuang (Sawndip). For Chinese it covers both traditional form characters and simplified form characters (it has full coverage of all Chinese simplified characters included in Unicode, as well as all corresponding traditional form characters). The font also includes many rare or archaic characters that are not found in most CJK fonts, as well as many characters used for the scholarly transcription of Early Chinese texts written on bone, bronze, wood, bamboo, and silk. The current version of BabelStone Han supports Unicode 16.0 which was released on 10 September 2024.
* A plain text file listing all IDS sequences for CJK unified ideographs in Unicode version 16.0 is available as IDS.TXT.
BabelStone Han was created by merging the "AR PL Mingti2L Big5" font (13,068 CJK Unified Ideographs) and "AR PL SungtiL GB" font (6,763 CJK Unified Ideographs), which were both released by Arphic Technology (文鼎科技) in 2001 under the original Arphic Public License [see below]. The merged font, comprising 14,907 CJK Unified Ideographs, was then converted to Unicode mappings, and has since been expanded to provide full coverage of all characters in the main CJK block (URO), full coverage of CJK Extensions A, D, and I, and partial coverage of CJK Extensions B, C, E, F, G, and H. The original CJK glyphs have been modified where appropriate to match the G-source glyphs given in the Unicode code charts.
This font is under continuous development, as tens of thousands of additional CJK ideographs are scheduled for inclusion in Unicode over then next few years. I intend to add as many of these new characters to BabelStone Han as I can, but I will never be able to include anywhere near all the CJK ideographs that have been and will be added to Unicode, so I am concentrating on G-source additions (i.e. characters used in China). However, if there are any characters that you would like to have added to BabelStone Han urgently just let me know (email) and I will try to fast-track their inclusion in the font. Please also let me know if you notice any glyph errors.
| Unicode Block | Total Coverage | G-Source Coverage | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Characters | Percentage | Characters | Percentage | |
| CJK Unified Ideographs | 20,992 / 20,992 | 100% | 20,933 / 20,933 | 100% |
| CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A | 6,592 / 6,592 | 100% | 6,197 / 6,197 | 100% |
| CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B | 16,839 / 42,720 | 39.4% | 13,355 / 30,550 | 43.7% |
| CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C | 2,267 / 4,154 | 54.5% | 1,130 / 1,130 | 100% |
| CJK Unified Ideographs Extension D | 222 / 222 | 100% | 78 / 78 | 100% |
| CJK Unified Ideographs Extension E | 3,449 / 5,762 | 59.8% | 2,369 / 2,822 | 83.9% |
| CJK Unified Ideographs Extension F | 3,177 / 7,473 | 42.5% | 1,309 / 1,309 | 100% |
| CJK Unified Ideographs Extension G | 3,454 / 4,939 | 69.9% | 1,331 / 2,082 | 63.9% |
| CJK Unified Ideographs Extension H | 2,379 / 4,192 | 56.7% | 829 / 829 | 100% |
| CJK Unified Ideographs Extension I | 622 / 622 | 100% | 622 / 622 | 100% |
| CJK Compatibility Ideographs | 12 / 12 | 100% | 12 / 12 | 100% |
| Total | 60,005 / 97,680 | 61.4% | 48,165 / 66,564 | 72.4% |
BabelStone Han supports 48,165 out of the 66,564 CJK unified ideographs with a G-source (China) reference. A summary of the remaining 18,399 G-source characters that are not yet available in the font is given in the table below. The 294 GZ characters should be completed in the next major release of BabelStone Han.
| Source | Block | Count |
|---|---|---|
| GHZ (漢語大字典) | Ext. B | 6,453 |
| GHZR (汉语大字典（第二版）) | Ext. G | 457 |
| GKX (康熙字典) | Ext. B | 10,742 |
| GZ (古壮字字典) | Ext. G | 294 |
| GZJW (殷周金文集成引得) | Ext. E | 453 |
As version 15.1.1 reached the maximum glyph limit of 65,535 glyphs, from version 15.1.3 onwards all PUA characters in the range E080 through F8DF have been removed from the main BabelStone Han font, and are only available in the BabelStone Han PUA font.
BabelStone Han is released under the original Arphic Public License, and may be used and distributed freely for personal or commercial purposes. The license also allows you to modify the font in any way you like (e.g. add/remove/modify glyphs or change the character mappings) without seeking my permission, as long as the modified font retains the Arphic Public License. If you do intend to distribute a modified version of BabelStone Han, please ensure that the font name (and all relevant fields in the name table) is changed to something different, so as not to cause confusion between my font and your modified font. In particular, please do not use "BabelStone" in the font name.
In 2010 Arphic Technology released two new public fonts, "AR PLMingU20 Light" (文鼎ＰＬ明體U20-L) and "AR PLBaosong2GBK Light" (文鼎ＰＬ報宋2GBK), both under a new Arphic Public License. The old license (which BabelStone Han uses) explicitly allows distributers of the original or modified font to make a financial gain ("If you wish, you can charge for this service"), whereas the terms of the new license explicitly restrict distribution of the original or modified font to "only for non-profit purpose". The two new fonts both have complete coverage of the 20,902 original characters in the main CJK block, and it would have saved me hundreds of hours of work to use one of these fonts as the basis for my font, but I prefer to use the old fonts with the original, unrestricted license.
Traditional Chinese Text
Simplified Chinese Text
BabelStone Han includes a total of 64,736 Unicode characters (64,620 named Unicode characters and 116 Private Use Area characters), and has a total of 65,449 glyphs. The font includes coverage for a wide range of Han ideographs and Unicode symbols as listed in the table below. The font is a dual-width font, with a mixture of full-width characters and half-width characters, as indicated in the column headed "Character Width" (a few symbol characters are multiple half-width character width).
| Unicode Block | Range | Coverage | Character Width | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic Latin | 00000..0007F | 97 out of 97 characters | Half-width | |
| Latin-1 Supplement | 00080..000FF | 91 out of 128 characters | Half-width | |
| Latin Extended-A | 00100..0017F | 16 out of 128 characters | Half-width | |
| Latin Extended-B | 00180..0024F | 18 out of 208 characters | Half-width | |
| Spacing Modifier Letters | 002B0..002FF | 25 out of 80 characters | Half-width | |
| Combining Diacritical Marks | 00300..0036F | 18 out of 112 characters | Full-width | |
| Tibetan | 00F00..00FFF | 7 out of 211 characters | Full-width | Religious and astrological symbols |
| Mongolian | 01800..018AF | 3 out of 158 characters | Full-width | Lozenge-shaped punctuation marks |
| Combining Diacritical Marks Extended | 01AB0..01AFF | 1 out of 31 characters | Full-width | Combining wavy line below for use with Han ideographs |
| Latin Extended Additional | 01E00..01EFF | 2 out of 256 characters | Half-width | |
| General Punctuation | 02000..0206F | 111 out of 111 characters | Mixed | |
| Superscripts and Subscripts | 02070..0209F | 27 out of 42 characters | Half-width | |
| Currency Symbols | 020A0..020CF | 3 out of 32 characters | Full-width | |
| Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols | 020D0..020FF | 3 out of 33 characters | Full-width | |
| Number Forms | 02150..0218F | 49 out of 60 characters | Full-width | |
| Arrows | 02190..021FF | 53 out of 112 characters | Full-width | |
| Mathematical Operators | 02200..022FF | 11 out of 256 characters | Full-width | |
| Miscellaneous Technical | 02300..023FF | 27 out of 256 characters | Full-width | |
| Enclosed Alphanumerics | 02460..024FF | 160 out of 160 characters | Full-width | |
| Box Drawing | 02500..0257F | 128 out of 128 characters | Full-width | |
| Block Elements | 02580..0259F | 32 out of 32 characters | Full-width | |
| Geometric Shapes | 025A0..025FF | 96 out of 96 characters | Full-width | |
| Miscellaneous Symbols | 02600..026FF | 61 out of 256 characters | Full-width | |
| Dingbats | 02700..027BF | 11 out of 192 characters | Full-width | |
| Supplemental Arrows-A | 027F0..027FF | 2 out of 16 characters | Full-width | |
| Supplemental Arrows-B | 02900..0297F | 16 out of 128 characters | Full-width | |
| Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-B | 02980..029FF | 10 out of 128 characters | Full-width | |
| Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows | 02B00..02BFF | 79 out of 253 characters | Full-width | |
| Supplemental Punctuation | 02E00..02E7F | 7 out of 94 characters | Full-width | |
| CJK Radicals Supplement | 02E80..02EFF | 115 out of 115 characters | Full-width | |
| Kangxi Radicals | 02F00..02FDF | 214 out of 214 characters | Full-width | |
| Ideographic Description Characters | 02FF0..02FFF | 16 out of 16 characters | Full-width | |
| CJK Symbols and Punctuation | 03000..0303F | 53 out of 64 characters | Full-width | |
| Hiragana | 03040..0309F | 93 out of 93 characters | Full-width | Decomposed (NFD) characters and named sequences also supported |
| Katakana | 030A0..030FF | 96 out of 96 characters | Full-width | Decomposed (NFD) characters and named sequences also supported |
| Bopomofo | 03100..0312F | 43 out of 43 characters | Full-width | Poor quality glyphs |
| Kanbun | 03190..0319F | 16 out of 16 characters | Full-width | |
| Bopomofo Extended | 031A0..031BF | 32 out of 32 characters | Full-width | Poor quality glyphs |
| CJK Strokes | 031C0..031EF | 39 out of 39 characters | Full-width | |
| Katakana Phonetic Extensions | 031F0..031FF | 16 out of 16 characters | Full-width | |
| Enclosed CJK Letters and Months | 03200..032FF | 192 out of 255 characters | Full-width | |
| CJK Compatibility | 03300..033FF | 73 out of 256 characters | Full-width | |
| CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A | 03400..04DBF | 6,592 out of 6,592 characters | Full-width | |
| Yijing Hexagram Symbols | 04DC0..04DFF | 64 out of 64 characters | Full-width | |
| CJK Unified Ideographs | 04E00..09FFF | 20,992 out of 20,992 characters | Full-width | |
| Modifier Tone Letters | 0A700..0A707 | 8 out of 32 characters | Full-width | |
| Latin Extended-D | 0A720..0A7FF | 1 out of 199 characters | Half-width | |
| Private Use Area | 0E000..0F8FF | 116 out of 6,400 characters | Full-width |
E000..E01D: Song and Yuan dynasty flute notation symbols. E020..E04B: Tang and Song dynasty lute notation symbols. E050..E07F: Miscellaneous symbols, including the single and triple paluta marks (E05E..E05F), the symbol of chaos (E061), and Daoist Mountain symbols (E070..E074). F8E0..F8FD: Unencoded kana letters. F8FE..F8FF: small-form ideographs. NB Unencoded ideographs and ideographic components in the range E080 through F8DF are now only available in the BabelStone Han PUA font. |
| CJK Compatibility Ideographs | 0F900..0FAFF | 472 out of 472 characters | Full-width | See Glyph Forms below for explanation of the glyph forms used in the font. |
| Variation Selectors | 0FE00..0FE0F | 16 out of 16 characters | Full-width | |
| Vertical Forms | 0FE10..0FE1F | 10 out of 10 characters | Full-width | |
| CJK Compatibility Forms | 0FE30..0FE4F | 32 out of 32 characters | Full-width | |
| Small Form Variants | 0FE50..0FE6F | 26 out of 26 characters | Full-width | |
| Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms | 0FF00..0FFEF | 173 out of 225 characters | Full-width | |
| Specials | 0FFF0..0FFFF | 5 out of 5 characters | Full-width | |
| Ideographic Symbols and Punctuation | 16FE0..16FFF | 4 out of 7 characters | Full-width | |
| Kana Supplement | 1B000..1B0FF | 256 out of 256 characters | Full-width |
Archaic Hiragana and Katakana letters added in Unicode 6.0 Hentaigana letters added in Unicode 10.0. Glyphs auto-traced from the Unicode code charts. |
| Kana Extended-A | 1B100..1B12F | 35 out of 35 characters | Full-width | Hentaigana letters added in Unicode 10.0. Glyphs auto-traced from the Unicode code charts. |
| Small Kana Extension | 1B130..1B16F | 9 out of 9 characters | Full-width | |
| Symbols for Legacy Computing Supplement | 1CC00..1CEBF | 36 out of 686 characters | Full-width | Outlined letters A-Z and outlined digits 0-9 |
| Tai Xuan Jing Symbols | 1D300..1D35F | 87 out of 87 characters | Full-width | |
| Counting Rod Numerals | 1D360..1D37F | 25 out of 25 characters | Full-width | |
| Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement | 1F100..1F1FF | 174 out of 200 characters | Full-width | |
| Enclosed Ideographic Supplement | 1F200..1F2FF | 64 out of 64 characters | Full-width | |
| Miscellaneous Symbols And Pictographs | 1F300..1F5FF | 64 out of 768 characters | Full-width | |
| Transport and Map Symbols | 1F680..1F6FF | 5 out of 118 characters | Full-width | |
| Geometric Shapes Extended | 1F780..1F7FF | 90 out of 103 characters | Full-width | |
| Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs | 1F900..1F9FF | 2 out of 256 characters | Full-width | |
| Chess Symbols | 1FA00..1FA6F | 14 out of 98 characters | Full-width | Xiangqi game symbols |
| Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A | 1FA70..1FAFF | 1 out of 114 characters | Full-width | |
| Symbols for Legacy Computing | 1FB00..1FBFF | 10 out of 249 characters | Full-width | Segmented digits 0-9 |
| CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B | 20000..2A6DF | 16,839 out of 42,720 characters | Full-width | |
| CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C | 2A700..2B73F | 2,267 out of 4,154 characters | Full-width | Added in Unicode 5.2 |
| CJK Unified Ideographs Extension D | 2B740..2B81F | 222 out of 222 characters | Full-width | "Urgent need characters", added in Unicode 6.0 |
| CJK Unified Ideographs Extension E | 2B820..2CEAF | 3,449 out of 5,762 characters | Full-width | Added in Unicode 8.0 |
| CJK Unified Ideographs Extension F | 2CEB0..2EBEF | 3,177 out of 7,473 characters | Full-width | Added in Unicode 10.0 |
| CJK Unified Ideographs Extension I | 2EBF0..2EE5F | 622 out of 622 characters | Full-width | Added in Unicode 15.1 |
| CJK Compatibility Ideographs Supplement | 2F800..2FA1F | 542 out of 542 characters | Full-width | See Glyph Forms below for explanation of the glyph forms used in the font. |
| CJK Unified Ideographs Extension G | 30000..3134F | 3,454 out of 4,939 characters | Full-width | Added in Unicode 13.0 |
| CJK Unified Ideographs Extension H | 31350..323AF | 2,379 out of 4,192 characters | Full-width | Added in Unicode 15.0 |
| Variation Selectors Supplement | E0100..E01EF | 240 out of 240 characters | Full-width |
The glyph forms for CJK unified ideographs in BabelStone Han are in principle based on the G-source glyph forms defined by the Standardization Administration of China that are given in the Unicode code charts:
If there is no G-source glyph for a particular unified ideograph, then I generally use a glyph form that is consistent with G-source glyph conventions, even if it may not exactly match the glyph form in the Unicode code chart. Where the G-source glyph form for a character in the SIP or TIP is inconsistent with G-source conventions, or seems to be incorrect, the font gives the expected correct glyph form, but the font also provides the G-source glyph form as an unofficial ideographic variation sequence (see below). NB BabelStone Han glyph forms for G-source characters in the BMP (URO and Ext. A) should always follow the code charts. All G-source characters for which the BabelStone Han glyph form deliberately does not match the code chart glyph form are listed below:
| Code Point | BS Han Glyph | G-Source Glyph | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VS | Glyph | VS | Glyph | Source Ref. | |
| U+29B9A | VS17 | 𩮚󠄀 | VS18 | 𩮚󠄁 | GKX-1455.47 |
| U+2A931 | VS17 | 𪤱󠄀 | VS18 | 𪤱󠄁 | GBK-1002.97 |
| U+2A99D* | VS17 | 𪦝󠄀 | VS18 | 𪦝󠄁 | GZJW-00855 |
| U+2A9B3* | VS17 | 𪦳󠄀 | VS18 | 𪦳󠄁 | GZJW-00879 |
| U+2B058* | VS17 | 𫁘󠄀 | VS18 | 𫁘󠄁 | GZJW-01380 |
| U+2B37A* | VS17 | 𫍺󠄀 | VS18 | 𫍺󠄁 | GZFY-00398 |
| U+2B71C* | VS17 | 𫜜󠄀 | VS18 | 𫜜󠄁 | GZJW-01907 |
| U+2B71E* | VS17 | 𫜞󠄀 | VS18 | 𫜞󠄁 | GZJW-01915 |
| U+2B9FC* | VS17 | 𫧼󠄀 | VS18 | 𫧼󠄁 | GZJW-00671 |
| U+2BBA9* | VS17 | 𫮩󠄀 | VS18 | 𫮩󠄁 | GZJW-00822 |
| U+2BC71* | VS17 | 𫱱󠄀 | VS18 | 𫱱󠄁 | GZJW-00864 |
| U+2BDFC* | VS17 | 𫷼󠄀 | VS18 | 𫷼󠄁 | GZJW-00987 |
| U+2BE43* | VS17 | 𫹃󠄀 | VS18 | 𫹃󠄁 | GZJW-01011 |
| U+2BE64* | VS17 | 𫹤󠄀 | VS18 | 𫹤󠄁 | GZJW-01027 |
| U+2C2C9* | VS17 | 𬋉󠄀 | VS18 | 𬋉󠄁 | GZJW-01253 |
| U+2C2E3 | VS17 | 𬋣󠄀 | VS18 | 𬋣󠄁 | GZJW-01806 |
| U+2CE5C* | VS17 | 𬹜󠄀 | VS18 | 𬹜󠄁 | GZJW-01910 |
| U+2CE5E* | VS17 | 𬹞󠄀 | VS18 | 𬹞󠄁 | GZJW-00846 |
| U+2CE5F* | VS17 | 𬹟󠄀 | VS18 | 𬹟󠄁 | GZJW-01911 |
| U+2CE60* | VS17 | 𬹠󠄀 | VS18 | 𬹠󠄁 | GZJW-01912 |
| U+2CE61* | VS17 | 𬹡󠄀 | VS18 | 𬹡󠄁 | GZJW-01913 |
| U+2CE62* | VS17 | 𬹢󠄀 | VS18 | 𬹢󠄁 | GZJW-01914 |
| U+301A5 | VS17 | 𰆥󠄀 | VS18 | 𰆥󠄁 | GHZR-10087.29 |
| U+31F5C | VS17 | 𱽜󠄀 | VS18 | 𱽜󠄁 | GXM-00285 |
For the characters marked with an asterisk in the table above, the BabelStone Han glyph form matches the glyph form given in GB 18030-2022 or GB 18030-2022 Amd. 1. The majority of these are characters sourced to GZJW (殷周金文集成引得) in Exts. C and E.
For CJK compatibility ideographs, where there is a G-source then the BabelStone Han character follows the G-source glyph form. Where there is no G-source, but the glyph forms of the compatibility ideograph and its corresponding unified ideograph are the same for the same source, then the BabelStone Han character uses the same glyph as for the corresponding unified ideograph in the font. In all other cases, the BabelStone Han character is based on the glyph form of the compatibility ideograph, but with G-source glyph conventions applied in most cases.
BabelStone Han supports the following OpenType features.
| Script | Language | Features | Explanation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Han <hani> | Default <dflt> | Standard Ligatures <liga> | Support for a limited set of vertically-combining Han ideographic ligatures, composed by putting U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER (ZWJ) between the two unified ideographs to be ligatured. These are listed in BSH_ZWJ.html. |
| Han <hani> | Default <dflt> | Standard Ligatures <liga> | Support for a limited set of combining sequences of CJK unified ideographs and the Vietnamese reading marks encoded at U+16FF0 and U+16FF1. NB These do not work on most desktop applications running on Windows, but should work in recent web browsers (test page). |
| Han <hani> | Default <dflt> | Contextual Alternates <calt> | Automatically rotates Suzhou numerals 1-3 when adjacent to each other (〡〢〣). |
| Latin <latn> | Default <dflt> | Standard Ligatures <liga> | Sequences of two, three or four consecutive instances of U+1D377 TALLY MARK ONE 𝍷 should be ligatured into a single character space (𝍷𝍷, 𝍷𝍷𝍷, 𝍷𝍷𝍷𝍷). |
| Hiragana and Katakana <kana> | Default <dflt> | Standard Ligatures <liga> | Used to compose decomposed Hiragana, Katakana and Hentaigana characters, including extended katakana sequences used for Ainu. |
BabelStone Han supports 1,002 standardized variation sequences for 902 CJK Unified Ideographs corresponding to CJK Compatibility Ideographs (see StandardizedVariants.txt "CJK compatibility ideographs"). It also supports 16 standardized variation sequences for eight East Asian punctuation marks (see StandardizedVariants.txt "East Asian punctuation positional variants").
BabelStone Han supports a provisional set of 2,452 ideographic variation sequences (IVS) for 1,196 characters. These are listed on this page (plain text listing at BSH_IVS.TXT). These are not yet registered in the Ideographic Variation Database (IVD), but it is intended to register a BabelStone IVS collection in the IVD at a future date. The IVS sequences currently in the font are not stable, and some may be modified or removed in response to user feedback and expert review.
BabelStone Han was created on 25 May 2009, and numerous versions have been released since then, with several releases in most years. See BabelStone Han Version History for details of all releases.
BabelStone Han is free to download and use for personal or commercial purposes. For use on your computer or mobile device please download and install the TTF file (or the ZIP containing the TTF file). The WOFF and WOFF2 files are for web hosting only, and are not required by most users.
| Font | Version | Download | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| BabelStone Han |
16.0.2 (2024-10-14) |
BabelStoneHan.zip [19.5 MB] BabelStoneHan.ttf [49.5 MB] BabelStoneHan.woff [19.2 MB] BabelStoneHan.woff2 [7.0 MB] |
See Version History for details |
| BabelStone Han PUA |
1.451 (2024-10-14) |
BabelStoneHanPUA.ttf [4.75 MB] |
Includes 5,892 Private Use Area (PUA) CJK ideographs and components in the range U+E080 through U+F8DF (for technical reasons these are no longer available in the main BabelStone Han font). |
| BabelStone Han Erjian 1 |
1.1.6 (2023-09-01) |
BabelStoneErjian1.ttf [6.58 MB] |
Table 1 2nd stage simplified glyph forms mapped to the corresponding standard simplified form of the character. |
| BabelStone Han Erjian 2 |
1.1.12 (2023-09-01) |
BabelStoneErjian2.ttf [6.38 MB] |
Table 1 and Table 2 2nd stage simplified glyph forms mapped to the corresponding standard simplified form of the character. |
I do not maintain an archive of old versions of BabelStone Han, but version-identified zip files of the current and previous version of the font are available for download here:
