No bold font support in Chinese

[ykla]

No bold font support in Chinese, such as 你好 or 你好世界！

**你好**  ***你好世界！***

The Bold font not work for Chinese

[kangarruu]

@ykla, thanks for writing in and for being a part of the GitHub Mobile community. Can you elaborate a bit more on where you're seeing this behavior? Is it across the app? or in specific views, such as comments, README etc? Is this on iOS or Android?

[Natuworkguy]

Yeah, this happens mostly on mobile devices, not desktop. Most mobile Chinese system fonts (like PingFang SC on iOS or Noto Sans CJK on Android) don’t include true bold weights, so Markdown bold (你好) won’t visually change the text.

On desktop, browsers can fake bolding more easily, but on mobile, the system font renderer skips it to avoid distortion.

If you want bold Chinese text on mobile, try:

Using a custom web font that includes bold weights (like Noto Sans CJK Bold).

Or wrap it in a span with CSS forcing higher font-weight:

你好世界！

So yeah — not a Markdown bug, just a font rendering limitation on mobile.

[AbdallahIsmaili]

Hey! This is actually a pretty common issue with Chinese text on mobile, and it's not really a bug, so just how fonts work on phones.

So basically, the Chinese fonts that come with iOS (PingFang SC) and Android (Noto Sans CJK) don't actually have bold versions built into them. When you try to make text bold with 你好, your phone looks for a bold weight of that font... and can't find it.
Unlike desktop browsers that will try to "fake" bold text by making the characters thicker, mobile devices usually just give up and show the regular weight instead. They do this to keep the text looking clean rather than rendering something that might look distorted.
That's why 你好 and 你好 look exactly the same on your phone, but might look different on desktop.

Honestly, there's not a perfect fix since it's a system-level thing, but here are some options:

Try other formatting – Sometimes italic, underline, or just using quotation marks works better for emphasis
Use a different font – If you're building something yourself, you could load a custom Chinese font that has proper bold weights (like Noto Sans CJK Bold)
CSS trick – You can force a higher font-weight with inline styles, though results vary:

html 你好世界！

By the way it's not GitHub's fault or a Markdown problem, it's just that mobile Chinese fonts don't include bold versions, so the bold formatting literally has nothing to work with. Desktop browsers can work around it better, but phones don't bother.

Hope that helps clarify things!