Hanping can display Chinese in a font of your choosing rather than the one that came with your device, on both Android and iOS. There's nothing to buy — it's part of the app.
Two reasons people do this. Either the system font has patchy coverage and rarer characters show up as empty squares, or you simply want something nicer to read — a 楷体 (kǎitǐ) font in particular shows the strokes much closer to the way characters are actually written by hand.
The whole job is getting a .ttf or .otf file onto your phone, then pointing Hanping at it. Downloading straight onto the phone is by far the easiest way.
1. Pick a font
Both of these are free, open-licensed and download as a font file you can use directly.
LXGW WenKai (霞鹜文楷) — recommended for learners
A 楷体 font, so the strokes match handwritten forms. Covers both simplified and traditional.
Download LXGWWenKai‑Regular.ttf
We host a copy so the download works everywhere, including places where GitHub is slow to reach. It's the unmodified font, released by its author under the SIL Open Font License.
Noto Sans SC / Noto Serif SC — best character coverage
Google's Noto family is the usual cure for empty squares, since it aims to cover every character. Files are on GitHub (SC for simplified, TC for traditional).
Prefer a link that gives you a .ttf or .otf directly. Some font sites hand you a
.zip, which you'd then have to unpack on the phone before Hanping can see the font inside it.
2. Get it onto your phone
Easiest is to open the download link in your phone's browser and save the file there and then:
- Android — tap the link in Chrome and it lands in your Downloads folder.
- iOS — tap the link in Safari and choose Download; it goes to Files ▸ Downloads.
It can also come from anywhere else Hanping's file picker can reach, so if the font is already on a computer, putting it in iCloud Drive, Google Drive or Dropbox works just as well.
On iOS this is not the same as installing a font system-wide (Settings ▸ General ▸ Fonts). Hanping keeps the font to itself, so there's no configuration profile to install.
3. Import it into Hanping
In Hanping, go to Settings / Hanzi Font, tap Import… and choose the file you just saved.
Here's 新 in LXGW WenKai. Note the tapered strokes and brush-like finishes — much closer to how the character is written by hand than a standard sans-serif font:
Looking for stroke order?
Fonts also exist that draw stroke-order numbers into the characters themselves, like this one:
This is CNstrokeorder by rtega, under the Arphic Public License. The common characters carry the numbers; anything not annotated simply renders as normal, so it's usable as your everyday font either way.
Worth knowing that Hanping's own animated stroke diagrams cover 9,574 characters and show the movement rather than just the sequence — so the font is more of a nice extra than a substitute.