Are there fonts in chinese

That is especially common in places such as Hong Kong, where both Chinese and English are considered official languages. Chinese also has larger spaces between each characters, compared to English letters. Ideally, there should be treated kerning between Chinese characters and English letters.

As we mentioned earlier, it takes a lot of effort to create a Chinese font. Fortunately, a lot of big Chinese brands — such as Alibaba, Xiaomi, Tencent, Vivo, and Oppo — are developing their own fonts for marketing purposes. Hopefully, that will lead to a greater variety of Chinese fonts in the future. Skip to content.

Gergana Toleva. How many kinds of Chinese are there? Writing Chinese language Historically, Chinese was set vertically and was being read from top to bottom and from right to left. You may also like: The 5 languages of Taiwan - Multilingual place indeed. You may also like: Inching our way into the peculiarities of Asian systems of measurement.

You may also like: Interesting phrases in Malay for your business. Exquisite or downright scary? Yuki Matsuri — the coolest festival in Japan! Related Posts. Languages of Asia Other language topics. The challenges in translating Khmer language 1 week ago. Desi Tzoneva. Is it better to have an LSP to handle your Asian translations? L10n matters: successes and failures in localization 4 weeks ago. At this point they are already exploring subtle variations. But the Eight Principles alone are not enough to represent the entire writing system.

To understand why the rest of the representative characters are important, we need to know a bit about Chinese characters themselves. A character is usually one or more radicals—which give it meaning—along with other parts that suggests how it should be pronounced. So if the tens of thousands of Chinese characters are really just re-combinations of a few dozen basic strokes the exact number is in dispute , why is creating a font so difficult?

This is true for many glyphs in Latin fonts, but Chinese is not so forgiving. So as designers tweak these representative characters, they also pay attention to how each individual stroke looks, because that will be important for other characters down the line.

Even in cases where it is in the same position, such as the left half of the character, the stroke weights and shapes are slightly different the characters shown below are the exact same font and size. Arphic actually has software that automates collecting the necessary components for a character, but that alone is never enough.

A simple stroke may fit nicely in one character but upset the balance of another, maybe by being too thick when there are many thin strokes, or vice versa. This means that, as Chinese typeface designers continue to add to the set of representative characters, they find cases where the stroke and radical designs they were once quite proud of do not hold up to the range of contexts they need to be used in.

These assumptions must be constantly challenged and revised. The revisions are harsh and numerous. Yeh shuddered when she was shown a first-draft page of her designs—it had more red ink than black. These revisions can become especially numerous because designers do not focus only on individual characters, but must also pay attention to how all of the characters come together to create the whole typeface.

To create this uniform experience, designers must apply the style established for the representative characters to the thousands of rare and strange characters that are left. They can finish anywhere between 10 and characters a day, getting faster as the style becomes more concrete. The sheer scale of the work involved has made it difficult for the Chinese language to enjoy the typographic diversity of Western ones, where there are varieties for every mood, style, and feel.

Increased demand for new ones is changing the equation, as it has for other non-Latin scripts. It raised 16 times that. One technological change is screen resolution. Until recently, screens were not able to handle the subtle curves and loops of more calligraphic Chinese. In fact, in the early days of computers, all but the simplest Chinese characters could not be represented accurately or even legibly. The low resolution of early 8-bit Japanese video-game masterpieces, like those on the Nintendo Famicom, forced developers to use hiragana, the phonetic representations of characters, instead of kanji , the complex characters themselves, which come from Chinese.

Another big change in technology is the ability to distribute fonts through the web. This has been possible for a number of years, but Chinese always posed a particular problem: with so many glyphs, the fonts require huge downloads for users that have not visited the site before, putting a strain on bandwidth both for user and provider. A Chinese font can run up to 6 or 7 megabytes for a single style and weight.

Because they are so much more complex, Chinese fonts may never be able to compete with their Latin counterparts on variety. Still, Chinese typographers are increasingly taking advantage of the higher demand. It helps that customers are used to paying a lot more for Chinese font licenses. That includes bold, semibold, italic, semibold italic, semibold light italic, and other permutations. These high fees also apply to Chinese webfonts—a growing source of income, as they become faster and more appealing to web developers.

Both Justfont and Arphic often draw inspiration from Latin typefaces, and that may point the way forward. As the Chinese characters are intimately related to the Japanese and Korean characters, the common character set for these three languages is often called CJK. The two legacy encodings are Big5 and Guobiao abbreviated GB. GB is usually used for Simplified Chinese that is the standard for mainland China.

GB has gone through several revisions. The latest is GB On the other hand, the latest world-wide standard, Unicode , has provided code pages for each separately so that a single font can contain both sets of characters. Yet, the legacy encodings still dominate Chinese computing.