In the East Asian writing system, gothic typefaces (; Japanese: ゴシック体|goshikku-tai; Korean: 돋움|dodum, Korean: 고딕체 godik-che) are a type style characterized by strokes of even thickness and lack of decorations akin to sans serif styles in Western typography. It is the second most commonly used style in East Asian typography, after Ming.
Gothic typefaces were first developed in Japan. Starting in the 1960s, the People's Republic of China's Shanghai Printing Technology and Research Institute developed new typefaces for Simplified Chinese, including gothic typefaces. The communist government favored gothic typefaces because they were plain and "represented a break with the past."[1]
Similar to Ming and Song typefaces, sans-serif typefaces were designed for printing, but they were also designed for legibility. They are commonly used in headlines, signs, and video applications.
Sans serif typefaces, especially for default system fonts, are common in Japanese computing. Also, many Korean computing environments use Gulim which includes soft curves but is a sans-serif typeface.
In Chinese, versions of Microsoft Windows XP and older, the default interface typefaces have serifs (MingLiU and SimSun), which deviates from the sans serif styling use in most other (including East Asian) regions of the product. Starting in Windows Vista, the default interface typefaces in all regions were changed to sans-serif styles, using Microsoft JhengHei in Traditional Chinese environments and Microsoft YaHei in Simplified Chinese environments.