Roboto font does not cover Chinese and Japanese signs

[Fischaela]

Roboto supports Latin, Greek (partial) and Cyrillic scripts.[4] On Android, the Noto font is used for languages not covered by Roboto, including Chinese (simplified and traditional), Japanese, Korean, Thai and Hindi.[5]

Source: Wikipedia

Use another font, when these languages are selected. Maybe use Noto, as suggested above.

[timpritlove]

Are there any other Open Source Fonts that might cover the all scripts?

[Fischaela]

The Noto font (by Google) is the first that comes to my mind in relation to support many scripts and be open source: https://www.google.com/get/noto/. There is also the Source Han Sans font by Adobe: http://blog.typekit.com/2014/07/15/introducing-source-han-sans/

[jperasmus]

Thanks @Fischaela, this totally helped me. Had a similar issue using Roboto to render Japanese and for some characters it actually rendered Chinese symbols.

[eteubert]

I guess this is the same issue as here, where Chinese (zh) is selected as language?

https://jsfiddle.net/twbfjbge/4/

Is there any workaround other than waiting for the fix?

[jperasmus]

Yeah, Japanese and Chinese are both affected by this. I got around the problem for both languages using @Fischaela's suggestion and conditionally uses Noto instead of Roboto when language is set to either ja or zh. I set the lang="zh" attribute on the html tag and then in my CSS just use something like this:

h1 {
  font-family: 'Roboto', sans-serif;
}

[lang="zh"] h1 {
  font-family: 'Noto Sans', sans-serif;
}

[haslinger]

I wanted to let you know, that the Roboto fonts included don't include the Cyrillic and Greek character sets. I patched them in my project, so you could pick them up from there (or download them from Google, as always): https://github.com/jekyll-octopod/jekyll-octopod/tree/master/assets/subscribe-button/fonts

[timpritlove]

Is it possible to patch japanesse and chinese fonts in too?

[haslinger]

Computer says no ;-) Roboto does only come with the character sets mentioned above, see also: https://github.com/google/roboto/issues/228 And patching in characters from a different font is a visual mess.

Typically it's suggested to exchange Roboto for Noto for getting a bigger character set. They are similar, but nowhere near identical, see: this comparison.

Update: Google uses Noto on Android, where Roboto falls short, says the Wikipedia Article on Roboto