How to typeset rare Chinese characters?

Question

While the around 6,000 common Chinese characters can be supported by the CJK package (or the ctex family of documentclasses) well, what if I want to type some (relatively) rare Chinese characters (it is said that there are about 60,000 Chinese characters in total) which, for example, appeared in ancient poems and documents?

For instance, today I tried typesetting the following characters

玕, 襜褕, 雰雰

in a poem under the CJK environment (later I changed my documentclass to ctexbook), I can't see them in the output pdf document.

I believe there probably are some ways to handle this issue in LaTeX, but I don't know how to carry out these potential solutions to get my missing (but important) characters printed out.

A google search leads me to a reference aiming to solve this problem. The solution therein looks promising in theory, however, I was not able to find the HanGlyph package described in this paper from CTAN so the implementation is still a problem.

It would be greatly appreciated if anyone could provide me with some guidelines (I am making a document that collects Chinese ancient poems. Therefore, the chance that I met these rare characters is pretty high.).

---

My code:

\documentclass[12pt]{ctexart}

\usepackage{xeCJK}

\begin{document}
美人赠我琴琅玕

美人赠我襜褕貂

欲往从之雰雰雪
\end{document}

My output:

Answer 1

I don’t know whether any fonts available for use with pdftex contain the characters you need. But if you compile with luatex or xetex rather than pdftex, then you can choose any .otf or .ttf font with these characters and load it with fontspec. This Unicode Character Search can help you find appropriate fonts; if you’re interested in purchasing a commercial typeface, myfonts.com allows you to search by character, as explained here.

Having chosen a typeface, you can either install it on your system or, if you are compiling on-line at Overleaf, upload it as described in Overleaf’s help pages. Unless it is one of the many fonts already available on Overleaf, you will then refer to the font by its file name when you invoke fontspec, as in Mico’s example.

Answer 2

I guess you need a font that provides all needed glyphs. SimHei may just be such a font. The font features a bit more than 28,000 glyphs, the vast majority of which would appear to be Chinese characters.

% !TEX TS-program = lualatex
\documentclass[12pt]{article}

\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{SimHei.ttf}

\begin{document}
美人赠我琴琅玕

美人赠我襜褕貂

欲往从之雰雰雪
\end{document}