ziano・傳承字形 webfont CDN

Free, CDN-hosted, drop-in 傳承字形 / 舊字形 (heritage / orthodox glyph form) Traditional-Chinese webfonts. ziano does for heritage CJK what Fontsource does for Latin: it slices OFL fonts into unicode-range woff2 subsets and publishes per-family npm packages, so jsDelivr/unpkg serve them for free and a page downloads only the glyphs it actually uses.

Why: almost every TC webfont on the open web renders Taiwan's MOE national standard forms (國字標準字體). ziano serves the orthodox heritage forms instead. JP/SC/KR runs deliberately fall through to system fonts.

See docs/superpowers/specs/ for the full design.

Roster

黑 (sans)・明 (serif)・楷 (cursive) — all three styles covered.

Package	Family	Style	Format	Weights	Glyph forms
@hanzi.pro/webfonts-shanggu-serif	尚古宋 Shanggu Serif	明 serif	VF	250–900	full 舊字形・丹 (異體字增強, flagship)
@hanzi.pro/webfonts-shanggu-sans	尚古黑 Shanggu Sans	黑 sans	VF	250–900	full 舊字形・丹 (異體字增強, flagship)
@hanzi.pro/webfonts-shanggu-serif-yue	尚古宋 Shanggu Serif Yue	明 serif	VF	250–900	full 舊字形・月 (Unicode 忠實)
@hanzi.pro/webfonts-shanggu-sans-yue	尚古黑 Shanggu Sans Yue	黑 sans	VF	250–900	full 舊字形・月 (Unicode 忠實)
@hanzi.pro/webfonts-genki-serif-yue	源起明體 Genki Serif Yue	明 serif	static	7	neutral・月 (milder, default-alt)
@hanzi.pro/webfonts-genki-sans-yue	源起黑體 Genki Sans Yue	黑 sans	static	6	neutral・月 (milder, default-alt)
@hanzi.pro/webfonts-genki-serif	源起明體 Genki Serif	明 serif	static	7	丹 (傳承印刷體)
@hanzi.pro/webfonts-genki-sans	源起黑體 Genki Sans	黑 sans	static	6	丹 (傳承印刷體)
@hanzi.pro/webfonts-lxgw-wenkai-tc	LXGW WenKai TC 霞鶩文楷	楷 cursive	static	3	傳承字形 (TC)
@hanzi.pro/webfonts-lxgw-wenkai	LXGW WenKai 霞鶩文楷	楷 cursive	static	3	傳承字形 (SC)
@hanzi.pro/webfonts-iansui	Iansui 芫荽	楷 cursive	static	1	國字標準字體 (MOE)
@hanzi.pro/webfonts-klee-one	Klee One	楷 cursive	static	2	JP 楷 (Klee)

Genki weights: serif 250 300 400 500 600 700 900, sans 250 300 400 500 700 900 (no 350). LXGW weights: 300 400 500. Klee One weights: 400 600.

丹 vs 月: 丹 is the more-heritage 傳承印刷體 cut, 月 the milder / Unicode-faithful one. No suffix always means 丹 — one rule, both families. Before 0.2.0 the suffix was -tc, which pointed opposite ways between them (Shanggu's base was 丹, Genki's was 月) and had to be explained every time; now -yue marks 月 explicitly and -tc means only what it says — a region variant, which is left to LXGW WenKai alone. The 丹 packages also ship their faces under the qualified … Dan name — see Saying the cut out loud.

Shanggu (VF) covers the full 舊字形 in both cuts — 丹 異體字-merges (内→內 even when you typed 内), 月 stays codepoint-faithful. Genki is the smaller, neutral default-alt.

Genki's Latin names changed with the same release: Min／Gothic → Serif／Sans, to match Shanggu and Source Han's own naming (思源宋體/黑體 = Source Han Serif/Sans), and the --font-serif / --font-sans-serif generics you plug them into. Upstream still calls them GenKi Min / GenKi Gothic — that is ButTaiwan's series convention (源流 GenRyuMin, 源雲 GenWanMin), not a mistake, so look for those names when you go back to the source.

源樣 GenYo (@hanzi.pro/webfonts-genyo-*) — Genki's visually-identical but 17–24 % larger predecessor — stays published but is no longer promoted; reach for Genki instead.

楷 (cursive) is offered widest because system 楷 fonts are scarce on mobile and restricted in macOS Safari — webfonts are often the only option. LXGW = 傳承字形 (TC + SC); Iansui = 國字標準字體; Klee One = the JP cut.

What the build changes about the fonts

Subsetting is not the only edit. Two normalisations are applied to every family before slicing, because both are file-level properties that CSS cannot reach:

Line metrics → hhea 1100/−340, usWin 1100/340. In vertical writing mode Chromium and Safari synthesise a glyph's central baseline as (ascent − |descent|) / 2, taken from whichever font drew the glyph — and a unicode-range-segmented @font-face is never the line's first available font, so these faces always take that path. Upstream disagrees wildly (Source Han lineage 1151/−286 → 0.4325em, ButTaiwan 880/−120 → 0.380em, LXGW WenKai 928/−256 → 0.336em), which lands two families up to 0.0965em apart across the column — a visible sideways jog wherever a 楷 quotation or a punctuation face sits inside body text. Every family now carries the same 0.380em centre (the em box, and what Hiragino / YuMincho / 源起 / 芫荽 already use, so the position holds when the webfont fails and a system font takes over). The sum, 1.44em, only sets line-height: normal and is kept close to Shanggu's own 1.437em.

The stylesheets restate the same numbers as ascent-override / descent-override, derived from one constant so they cannot drift — but the CSS is not the fix: Safari ignores those descriptors for this path, which is why the numbers are written into the files. Full derivation and measurements: docs/vertical-baseline-offset.md.

： and ； stay upright. UTR50 classes U+FF1A and U+FF1B as Tr — rotate by default unless the font's vert feature substitutes them. Firefox implements that faithfully, so on a font with no rule for them the colons lie on their side in vertical text (Chrome and Safari are lax and leave them upright either way). The build registers an identity (sentinel) substitution — the glyph maps to itself — which costs nothing visually and flips Firefox out of the rotate branch. Fonts that already map them are left alone: Klee One sends ： to a genuinely rotated JP form and LXGW WenKai SC to a re-centred one, and that is the designer's convention, not an oversight.

The files say who changed them. The shipped name table reads Ziano Shanggu Serif / Ziano 尙古明體丹, not Shanggu Serif VF — so a font manager, a desktop install, or anyone poking at the woff2 sees a file that admits it is a derivative. This is not an OFL requirement: none of the upstreams reserves the names we ship (Shanggu declares no copyright line at all; LXGW WenKai and Iansui name only their project authors; the Source Han derivatives reserve Adobe's Source, which we never use). It is honesty — the three edits above are invisible in a glyph diff. Weight names, copyright and licence records stay exactly as upstream wrote them.

The prefix is internal only. Your CSS says Shanggu Serif, and so do these stylesheets, the docs and the demos. A @font-face family is a label the author picks; making everyone type a publisher name into their font stacks would be branding, not honesty.

All three edits are listed in each package's LICENSE, under a MODIFICATIONS section after the OFL text.

Printed vs. handwriting: where MOE standard forms are (dis)allowed

ziano's correction target is the printed styles. The ban on the MOE national standard (國字標準字體) applies to 明 (serif) and 黑 (sans) only — the faces where heritage vs. standard forms are a real typographic choice.

楷 (style cursive) is a handwriting style, and in handwriting the MOE standard forms are legitimate (they are, after all, modelled on handwriting). So ziano admits a 楷 font that follows the MOE standard:

• @hanzi.pro/webfonts-iansui (Iansui 芫荽) — a 國字標準字體 楷. Allowed because it is handwriting, not print.
• @hanzi.pro/webfonts-lxgw-wenkai-tc (LXGW WenKai TC) — a 傳承字形 楷 (Klee-based).

Both ship side by side so users freely choose the kai orthography they want. The print faces (Shanggu, Genki) remain heritage-only.

Usage

/* flagship: Shanggu 丹, variable, full 舊字形 */
@import url("https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@hanzi.pro/webfonts-shanggu-serif/swap.css");
@import url("https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@hanzi.pro/webfonts-shanggu-sans/swap.css");

/* every package ships swap.css (default), block.css and optional.css.
   static families also expose one file per weight, e.g. swap/400.css */
@import url("https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@hanzi.pro/webfonts-lxgw-wenkai-tc/swap/400.css");

:root {
  --han-heritage-serif: "Shanggu Serif";
  --han-heritage-sans:  "Shanggu Sans";
}

The browser downloads only the slices your page hits. Uncovered codepoints fall through to the next font in your stack (by design — no tofu, and the mechanism by which JP/KR/SC stay on system fonts).

Saying the cut out loud

On npm no suffix always means 丹: webfonts-shanggu-serif is the 丹 cut, as it was in 0.1.0, and webfonts-shanggu-serif-yue is the 月 one. So the default stylesheet declares the plain name — nothing to migrate, and one rule to remember.

For a stack that would rather name the cut, every unsuffixed package also ships the same faces under the qualified name:

/* one font, two labels — import ONE of them */
@import url(".../webfonts-shanggu-serif/swap.css");      /* 'Shanggu Serif'     */
@import url(".../webfonts-shanggu-serif/dan/swap.css");  /* 'Shanggu Serif Dan' */

block.css and optional.css have the same twin under dan/ (static families also get dan/swap/<weight>.css), and the package exports it as @hanzi.pro/webfonts-shanggu-serif/dan. Importing both is harmless but pointless: identical URLs, every face declared twice under two names.

The font files themselves always carry the qualified name — a name table has no room for ambiguity. See What the build changes about the fonts.

Which CDN

The packages are plain npm packages, so any npm CDN serves them — switching host is just editing the @import URL, no republish. Recommended:

• jsDelivr (default). Multi-CDN with automatic failover, purpose-built for static npm assets, immutable caching on versioned paths, widest global reach. Use it unless you have a reason not to.

  @import url("https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@hanzi.pro/webfonts-shanggu-serif/swap.css");

• unpkg (Asia fallback). Cloudflare-fronted; from a Taipei POP it measured noticeably faster than jsDelivr (which routed via Singapore/Frankfurt). Good primary if your audience is overwhelmingly Taiwan/Asia — trading jsDelivr's multi-CDN resilience for lower regional latency.

  @import url("https://unpkg.com/@hanzi.pro/webfonts-shanggu-serif/swap.css");

Pin a version for production (@hanzi.pro/webfonts-shanggu-serif@0.2.0/...); jsDelivr and unpkg serve versioned paths immutably, so the npm version is your cache-buster.

System font first (local())

Where a font commonly ships on the OS, its @font-face src lists local() before the webfont url, so a browser that already has it downloads nothing:

src: local("Klee One"), local("Klee"), url(./files/klee-one.400.0.woff2) format('woff2');

@hanzi.pro/webfonts-klee-one (macOS often has Klee) and @hanzi.pro/webfonts-lxgw-wenkai prefer the local copy and only fetch slices when it is absent.

Tip: for static families, swap.css inlines every weight's @font-face. If you only need one or two weights, import those swap/<weight>.css files directly to cut bytes.

Build

uv sync
uv run python -m ziano.build <family-id>   # e.g. shanggu-serif
uv run pytest -q                                # add -m "not integration" to skip downloads

All fonts are OFL 1.1; each package bundles its upstream license. Sources are pinned by release tag + sha256 in roster.toml.