Question

With regard to displaying korean font:
I’m noticing when I use arial, it’s defaulting to sans-serif, which is of course different on Mac and Windows. I’m having a hard time finding information about this on the “internets”. I was hoping someone here might be able to tell me a list of fonts that would work on both Mac and Windows for Korean without needing to embed a font.

Live example

Mac:

Windows:

Answer 1

Since Arial does not contain hangul characters, the use of font-family: Arial, sans-serif is effectively equivalent to font-family: sans-serif for Korean text. Arial should be removed from the list, since would only cause harm – when some special symbols used on the page exist in Arial, the browser would use it for them, resulting in a mix of fonts.

Using sans-serif means using a browser-dependent sans-serif font. It is of little use here. Instead, list down a set of fonts known to contain the characters you need. You can hardly expect to find a single font for the purpose that would be available on all computers, unless you find a font you can use as a downloadable font (web font) via @font-face.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_fonts, there are fonts that are preinstalled on Windows, or at least shipped with it, containing Korean characters: Batang, Dotum, Gulim, Gungsuh, Malgun Gothic (no hanja). Probably none of them is present in all versions of Windows, and probably at least one of them is available in reasonably modern versions of Windows. But they are rather different.

You could also check the extensive page http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Korean.html and, if some of the free alternatives suits you, consider using it as a downloadable font. The fonts tend to be large, but the impact on efficiency might still be tolerable.