# Sarasa Gothic: a CJK composite font built from Inter, Iosevka and Source Han Sans > Sarasa Gothic merges a Latin coding face with a CJK sans into one family, and the naming scheme decides which variant you actually need. Here is what the repository documents, how to build it, and where it stops being the right choice. **be5invis/Sarasa-Gothic** — Sarasa Gothic / 更纱黑体 / 更紗黑體 / 更紗ゴシック / 사라사 고딕 - Repository: https://github.com/be5invis/Sarasa-Gothic - Stars: 12,826 · Forks: 400 - Language: JavaScript - License: NOASSERTION - Published: 2026-09-21 · Updated: 2026-09-21 · Language: en - Canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/be5invis-sarasa-gothic ## The bilingual mismatch Sarasa Gothic was assembled to fix Most Latin coding fonts stop at Latin, Greek and Cyrillic. When a document or a terminal needs Chinese, Japanese or Korean, the renderer falls back to whatever CJK font the system has, and the two halves do not match: different stroke weight, different x-height, different punctuation widths. Sarasa Gothic is a composite font that closes that gap by pairing a Latin face with Source Han Sans and shipping the result as one family. The README states the basis plainly: it is a CJK composite font based on Inter, Iosevka and Source Han Sans. The audience is narrow and specific. It is for people who write CJK and Latin in the same file and care that the two scripts sit on the same baseline with consistent weight, which in practice means developers, technical writers and anyone setting bilingual text in an editor or a terminal rather than in a page layout tool. ## Two naming axes: style dimension and orthography dimension The family is not one font. The README defines two independent dimensions, and the name of each build is a combination of the two. The style dimension is decided by which Latin character set is used. When Latin, Greek and Cyrillic come from Inter, full-width quotes produce Gothic and narrow quotes produce UI. When they come from Iosevka, full-width em dashes produce Mono, half-width em dashes produce Term, and no ligatures with half-width em dashes produce Fixed. The orthography dimension follows Source Han Sans notation: CL for Classical orthography, and SC, TC, J, K, HC for the regional forms. That gives a large grid of subfamily-orthography combinations, and the naming is the only thing that tells them apart. The practical consequence is that picking a Sarasa Gothic build is a two-part decision, not a single download. A terminal user who wants half-width dashes and no ligatures is looking at Fixed, not Mono. A user in mainland China setting Simplified Chinese text is looking at SC, not J. Getting either axis wrong produces a font that installs fine and reads wrong. ## Building Sarasa Gothic from source: Node.js, AFDKO and ttfautohint The README does not describe a package-manager install. It describes a build. You need Node.js version 20 or newer, AFDKO at the latest version, and ttfautohint installed. The package.json engines field agrees with the README, requiring node >=20.0.0. Once those prerequisites are present, install the dependencies: ```bash npm install ``` That runs the install script, which is node check-env.mjs, so a missing tool should surface here rather than halfway through a build. Then build the TTF files: ```bash npm run build ttf ``` The README says the output lands in the out/ttf directory. If you want the bundled collection instead, the command changes to: ```bash npm run build ttc ``` and the files appear in out/ttc. The README adds a warning worth taking literally: you will need a lot of memory to create TTCs, because of the huge quantity of subfamily-orthography combinations. That is the same grid described above, and it is why the TTC path is the expensive one. If you only want a font to use rather than to modify, the README points at two mirrors, TUNA and NJU, both in China, which serve the release artifacts. ## The TTC caching problem and why the README asks for a clean removal The first note in the README is not about features. It says it is highly recommended to completely remove the old version of the fonts before installing the newer version, because many operating systems and applications have caching trouble with large TTC fonts. This is a real operational cost that is easy to underestimate. An upgrade is not a drop-in replacement; it is uninstall, then install. If you skip it, the failure mode is not a crash but a stale render, where the system keeps serving the old glyphs and you cannot tell whether the new build is actually active. The build side has its own hard constraint: the TTC target needs a lot of memory, and the README states this without giving a number. The repository layout supports that reading, with make/, tools/, sources/ and hcfg/ directories and a verdafile.mjs driving the build through verda, plus a dependency set of @chlorophytum packages and ot-builder for font assembly. This is a font production pipeline, not a small script, and treating it as one is the fastest way to run out of memory. ## How Sarasa Gothic differs from Source Han Sans and from Nerd Font patching The obvious alternative is Source Han Sans itself, which Sarasa Gothic uses as its CJK half. Choosing Source Han Sans directly gives you the CJK coverage without the composite build, but it does not give you the Latin coding face: you would still be pairing it with something else, and the pairing is exactly the problem Sarasa Gothic exists to solve. The other direction is Nerd Font patching, which people search for alongside this project. That is a different operation: it takes an existing font and injects icon glyphs, rather than merging two typeface families into one design. If what you need is icons in your terminal, patching is the relevant approach; if what you need is CJK and Latin that look like one typeface, patching does not address it. The two are not substitutes. The README also does not document rollback beyond the removal instruction, so if you build a variant that reads badly in your editor, the recovery path is removing the installed font and installing a different build from the grid. ## Licence and the cost of tracking a font that moves The repository's licence is recorded as NOASSERTION, meaning the automated classifier could not map it to a standard identifier. The repository does contain a LICENSE file at the top level, and that file, not this article, is what governs use and redistribution. Anyone planning to bundle Sarasa Gothic into a product, a document template or a distributed application should read that file directly and, where the terms matter commercially, get their own advice. On maintenance: the last push was on 2026-08-22, and the releases list shows v1.0.41 on the same date, following v1.0.40 on 2026-06-27 and v1.0.39 on 2026-05-24. That is a steady release cadence through 2026. The upgrade cost is the removal step above plus, if you build from source, re-running the build against the current Node.js, AFDKO and ttfautohint requirements. If you consume the release artifacts from a mirror, the cost is the uninstall and reinstall, and the risk is the cache. ## Conclusion Sarasa Gothic is for people who mix CJK and Latin text in one document or terminal and want the two halves to look like one typeface: developers writing Chinese or Japanese comments next to English code, and anyone setting bilingual text who dislikes the mismatch between a coding font and a system CJK fallback. It is not for you if you need a single file that covers every orthography and style, because the family is deliberately split along two axes and the TTC build that bundles them needs a lot of memory. It is also the wrong tool if you only need Latin: Inter and Iosevka are available on their own, and Sarasa adds nothing for a monolingual Latin workflow. Before adopting it, verify three things: which style dimension (Gothic, UI, Mono, Term, Fixed) matches your editor or terminal, which orthography code (CL, SC, TC, J, K, HC) matches your readers, and whether your OS caches large TTC fonts cleanly, since the README warns that old versions should be removed completely before installing a newer one. ## FAQ ### What is Sarasa Gothic? It is a CJK composite font based on Inter, Iosevka and Source Han Sans, distributed as a family with several style and orthography variants. The README describes it as SARASA GOTHIC, a CJK composite font, and the repository is maintained by be5invis. ### Which Sarasa Gothic variant should I pick? The name encodes two choices. The style dimension depends on the Latin face: Inter gives Gothic (full-width quotes) or UI (narrow quotes), and Iosevka gives Mono (full-width em dashes), Term (half-width em dashes) or Fixed (no ligatures, half-width em dashes). The orthography dimension is CL, SC, TC, J, K or HC, following Source Han Sans notation. ### How do I build Sarasa Gothic from source? Install Node.js 20 or newer, AFDKO and ttfautohint, then run npm install followed by npm run build ttf, which writes to out/ttf. Running npm run build ttc instead writes to out/ttc, and the README notes that TTC creation needs a lot of memory. ### Where can I download Sarasa Gothic? The README lists two mirrors, TUNA at https://mirrors.tuna.tsinghua.edu.cn/github-release/be5invis/Sarasa-Gothic and NJU at https://mirror.nju.edu.cn/github-release/be5invis/Sarasa-Gothic. It does not name a package manager or an official site beyond the repository. ### Why should I remove the old version before installing a new one? The README states that many operating systems and applications have caching trouble with large TTC fonts, so it highly recommends completely removing the old fonts first. Skipping that step can leave a stale render rather than an obvious error. ## Sources - [be5invis/Sarasa-Gothic on GitHub](https://github.com/be5invis/Sarasa-Gothic) - [Issues](https://github.com/be5invis/Sarasa-Gothic/issues) - [README](https://github.com/be5invis/Sarasa-Gothic/blob/main/README.md) - [Releases](https://github.com/be5invis/Sarasa-Gothic/releases) --- Hysen Labs editorial analysis, written from the project's own repository and release notes. Cite the canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/be5invis-sarasa-gothic