MiSans Font: Perhaps Better Than Sarasa Gothic for Blog Body Text
Recently, while adjusting my blog font, I discovered that MiSans (Xiaomi Lanting) might be more suitable for body text reading than Sarasa Gothic.
Sarasa Gothic was the font I had been using - it combines Source Han Sans and Iosevka, has a strong modern feel, and comprehensive character coverage. But the reading experience never felt as good as the system default font. It wasn’t until I switched to MiSans that the contrast became obvious: MiSans has bolder, rounder letters, a more comfortable overall appearance, and doesn’t tire the eyes during extended reading.
MiSans was designed from the start with reading experience in mind - clear strokes, even gray levels, and when used in blog body text, the breathing space between characters is just right.
However, font effects largely depend on the operating system. Windows font rendering has always been a major issue - no matter how you adjust ClearType, compared to macOS’s native rendering, it always feels like looking through a veil. No matter what font you switch to, it’s hard to achieve a qualitative improvement. On iOS, whatever font you use, the rendering comes out with clear lines and smooth edges - truly pleasing to the eye.
On the Linux side, at least KDE Plasma’s rendering is quite good, with comfortable character shapes and spacing right out of the box. I haven’t used other desktop environments extensively, so I won’t comment on them for now.
Font Choice Goes Beyond Personal Preference
Actually, font selection really shouldn’t be based solely on personal preference: My blog article titles were previously in Traditional Chinese. I felt that using Traditional Chinese for titles had a classical aesthetic, while using Simplified Chinese for body text made for easier reading. But I was often criticized by friends who said they couldn’t understand the titles.
I had to switch fonts, but I could never achieve the feeling of Huaying Mincho font. After much折腾 (tinkering), I discovered that the Huaying Mincho provided by ZSFT actually has a Simplified Chinese version - it was calling the Traditional version from the T character set by default, rather than the Classic Simplified Chinese font. After modifying this, the titles finally returned to Simplified Chinese. The aesthetic quality dropped slightly, but readability greatly improved.
In the end, when it comes to fonts, there’s no absolute good or bad - only suitable or unsuitable. If your blog focuses on body text and you want to find a balance between Windows and macOS, you might want to try MiSans. At least for now, this is the reading font I find most comfortable.
Thoughts on Other Popular Fonts
As for the highly popular LXGW WenKai (霞鹜文楷) font, my personal view is that it’s more like handwritten Kai style rather than standard printed Kai style - in computer font classification, it’s closer to the artistic font category. Admittedly, many people favor it because it has more of the warmth and vitality of handwriting compared to common printed fonts. But for me, artistic fonts aren’t ideal for body text reading, and its style doesn’t quite match my blog’s tone.
Linux default fonts have mostly shifted from the WenQuanYi series to the Source Han (Noto) series. Source Han Sans is overall a standard, balanced, and stable font - compared to the somewhat immature WenQuanYi Micro Hei, its design is more mature. Perhaps because there were few excellent open source fonts in the past, most Linux distributions tended to choose the WenQuanYi series; now, most distributions and desktop environments have built-in Source Han Serif and Source Han Sans.