“… that Chinese instruction manual font”

(this is an old post from 2021 that got caught in my drafts somehow)

Mike asked:

To which I suggested:

Not very helpful links, more of a thought-dump:

• Why does Chinese printing of Latin characters always use the same font? – writing fonts curiosity | Ask MetaFilter
• The Roman typefaces used in Chinese and Japanese text | Hacker News

First PostScript font: STSong (华文宋体) was released in 1991, making it the first PostScript font by a Chinese foundry [ref: Typekit blog — Pan-CJK Partner Profile: SinoType]. But STSong looks like Garamond(ish).

Maybe source: GB 5007.1-85 24×24 Bitmap Font Set of Chinese Characters for Information Exchange. Originally from 1985, this is a more recent version: GB 5007.1-2010: Information technology—Chinese ideogram coded character set (basic set)—24 dot matrix font.