Windows has problems displaying Chinese font since Windows 98. And this inconsistent stroke width problem persists even today on Windows 10! Anyone using GDI/GDI+ technologies to display Chinese font, is likely to encounter this problem. I have seen this problem on posters and movie subtitles. This problem comes about using non-Chinese font such as Arial to display Chinese font. When the underlying font does not contain the glyph, Windows Uniscribe use a fallback mechanism to find the glyph from other font. Underneath, GDI/GDI+ make use of Uniscribe to display font. This may not be a problem on Chinese OS where the default font is Chinese type. The screenshot of Notepad reveals the problem.
The fix is to select a proper Chinese font to match language (Simplified/Traditional) to display Chinese characters. After changing to SimHei font, the stroke width is consistent.
Shao Voon is from Singapore. His interest lies primarily in computer graphics, software optimization, concurrency, security, and Agile methodologies.
In recent years, he shifted focus to software safety research. His hobby is writing a free C++ DirectX photo slideshow application which can be viewed
here.