> So how about listing sans-serif (Hei) before bitmap then?

Bitmaps are more like a compromise to poor hinting tech (could not handle the high stroke densities in Han (especially Hant) glyphs) + small pixel sizes (and perhaps small disk space) in the old days. Vectors can get rendered into a mess of black-and-white, so bitmaps were actually giving better legibility.

Now we have sfdhanautohint, HiDPI screens and bigger disks, so perhaps the only places for bitmaps to go are terminals and TTYs (Unibit actually worked very well for me.) 

> There is also a 69-unifont.conf, probably the differences between these unifonts and cjk fonts are not that big.

I was confused by all these "unifont"s at first. It seems that GNU has a "Unifont" which was mostly 16x16 pixel glyphs, and Arphic has something called CJKUnifonts (UMing, UKai), while the config file is more like listing some catch-all Unicode fallback fonts. 

> Because 65-nonlatin puts many
> Japanese fonts in front of Chinese fonts, when rendering a block of text with
> Han glyphs, one often see a mixture of Gothic, Mincho, Song and Kai glyphs,
> which looks horrible.

See my previous comment -- this has nothing to do with locale mixing. And Mincho is just Song. (See #Generics.)

> I suggest to put Chinese fonts in front of Japanese/Korean fonts.
> [...] consistent [...]

Previous comment gives a different rationale for this.

> Giving a higher priority to proprietary fonts

And nowadays many FOSS fonts look better than all these old proprietary favourites. (Sounds wise to kick them out directly now.)

* * *

Generics
--------

* Gothic is basically sans (just like western typography).
* Dotum{,Che} (rectangle hangul edges) and Gulim (round hangul edges) are Korean sans-serifs.
* Mincho is just "Ming Dynasty", i.e. Ming, which is actually when the "Song" (the Chinese dynasty after Ming) typefaces got its basic distinct shapes from Kai.
* Ming is just how people in non-mainland-China areas refer to Song/Sung. That includes Japan (Mincho), Taiwan, HK and Macau. Since it's kind of more correct historically, I prefer this name too.
* Batang (i.e. "basic" according to zh.wikipedia) is a Korean Ming.
* Kai is the most common Chinese script style, which is written neatly. Chinese cursive is called Cao (草), and Xing (行) is between the two. (XingKai is the more Kai-ish branch of Xing, the other one being XingCao.)

It then seems unwise to refer to typefaces using these locale-and-vendor-dependent names rather than "sans-serif", "serif" and "cursive" in logical fallback orders, with locale ordered discussed separately.

I am using Kai to match cursive because:

a. There are few Cao typefaces. (Complex ligations, adaptations to vertical writing...)
b. Cao is hardly legible.
c. Kai is very common (and available in FOSS forms -- unlike XingKai), and since people actually use "Comic Sans" to match cursive it doesn't sound too bad to me.

Scripts
-------

And some info on scripts that we have mentioned:

* Han/Kanji/Hanja: CJK Ideographs, e.g. 字体 (Hans)，字體 (Hant). The good news is that despite different writing standards, most simplified characters are not unified with their traditional forms, so most of the differences are tolerable. Bad news? Japanese have largely simplified their Han set on their side too (in 1946, with a great reduction to ~2K chars), and unfortunately unification with CN is seen in chars like 门.
* Hangul = "Hang": Korean phonetic alphabet mostly made up of Han strokes and circles.
* Kana = "Hrkt": Japanese phonetic alphabet with shapes originally sourced from simplifications of Chinese glyphs with the target pronunciations. There are two sets of Kana -- hiragana "Hira" (for native words) and katakana "Kana" (for foreign words mainly).

Many everyday Korean text only consist of Hanguls, while most Japanese text show a mix of Kanjis and Kanas.