The original LaTeX do not have good support for Chinese. With the development of LaTeX, we can now easily use Chinese in LaTeX document. In this post, I would like to introduce several ways to work with Chinese in LaTeX.

Use CTeX#

Use ctexart documentclass#

The CTeX group has developed multiple document classes and packages to deal with the particular need of Chinese typesetting.

If you have a long article mainly written in Chinese, you should choose ctexart document class. An MWE is shown below:

\documentclass[UTF8]{ctexart}

\begin{document}
你好，这是一个测试文档。
\end{document}

When using the ctexart documentclass, you should also add \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}. Otherwise, some of the characters will be shown incorrectly.

Use ctex package#

Or you can use the ctex package instead:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[UTF8]{ctex}
\begin{document}
你好，这是一个测试文档。
\end{document}

You can compile it with latex, pdflatex, xelatex or lualatex. xelatex is recommed from the author of this class.

Use xeCJK with xelatex#

If you only need to type a few Chinese character, you can go with xeCJK package and compile the document with xelatex. A MWE is shown below:

Click to check the code.
% this file can be compiled with xelatex command
\documentclass[12pt, a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage[slantfont, boldfont]{xeCJK}

% set up English font
\setmainfont{Microsoft YaHei}
\setsansfont{Comic Sans MS}
\setmonofont{Courier New}

% set up Chinese font, the font must be valid on your system
\setCJKmainfont{Microsoft YaHei}
\setCJKmonofont{Source Code Pro}
\setCJKsansfont{YouYuan}

% correct line break for chinese
\XeTeXlinebreaklocale "zh"
\XeTeXlinebreakskip = 0pt plus 1pt

\title{测试}
\author{东}
\date{2016年6月6日}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\begin{center}
满纸荒唐言\\
一把辛酸泪\\
都云作者痴\\
谁解其中味\\
\end{center}
\begin{verse}
\texttt{Stray birds of summer come to my window to sing and fly away}. \\
\textsf{And yellow leaves of autumn, which have no songs}, \\
\textrm{flutter and fall there with a sign}.\\
\hfill \emph{RabindranathTagore}
\end{verse}
\begin{verse}
\texttt{夏天的飞鸟}，\textsf{飞到我的窗前唱歌}，\textrm{又飞去了}。\\
秋天的黄叶，它们没有什么可唱，只叹息一声，飞落在那里。\\
\hfill \emph{罗宾德拉纳特·泰戈尔}
\end{verse}
\end{document}

For Chinese, the command \setCJKmainfont{} are used to set up the font used by main text, which is also used by \textrm{} command. \setCJKmonofont{} is used to set up the font used by \texttt{}. \setCJKsansfont{} is used to set up the font used by \textsf{}.

So how to find a valid Chinese font to use in these command? If you have installed TeX Live, it is easy to do. Just use the following command in your console:

fc-list :lang=zh

It will list all the fonts on your system which support Chinese. A sample output is as follows:

You can pick the font you like or experiment with different fonts to choose the one you want.

The above example is based on a number of posts, but I have removed several package since they are now redundant.

References#