The long process of creating a Chinese font
1–10 of 56 posts
Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font
#2This may not be in the 'spirit' of typography, but to me it seems like font creation ought to be automatable, to some degree. Artistic flourishes may have to be added in post-production, but the basic shapes (whether Latin or Chinese or whatever) with maybe some constraint engine or machine learning to get the kerning, etc. right could be bulk generated, parameterised by brush style and dynamics and anything else that can be simulated.
Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font
#3I know nothing of these subjects so I ask: is there any advantage to the typography and scrip system that is simplified Chinese vs a small alphabet a la Latin or Cyrillic?
Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font
#4I know nothing of these subjects so I ask: is there any advantage to the typography and scrip system that is simplified Chinese vs a small alphabet a la Latin or Cyrillic?
Hello, I'm the author of this piece. It's a very good question, and the answer may simply be that script systems are inferior, but anecdotally I would say there are two advantages:
First, it makes the etymology of the script is very apparent. Often etymology in for example English is very obscure, and requires great leaps of imagination and inference to make the connections. Compare that to the character 灣 referred to in the piece, which means "bay" and contains the "water radical." The etymology can be made more clear in this way.
Second, the script is agnostic to how the characters are pronounced. This is what has allowed it to be used for several languages in China (often inaccurately referred to as "dialects")—which are often pronounced completely differently—for hundreds of years.
That said, there are clearly many, many disadvantages, and the main thing preventing change may simply be inertia.
Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font
#5I know nothing of these subjects so I ask: is there any advantage to the typography and scrip system that is simplified Chinese vs a small alphabet a la Latin or Cyrillic?
It's possible that an ideographic writing system is faster to read, presuming one has got over the 'learning thousands of characters' hump without it affecting your ability to comprehend, as you're not converting a representation of sounds into morphemes, and ultimately words, into something meaningful. That is, the characters (or small clusters thereof) are meaningful in their own right, somewhat. That more direct mapping to meaning -- albeit somewhat abstracted over time -- might also be advantageous in terms of learning simple nouns and constructs (e.g., "this character means 'horse' because it kinda looks like one", etc.).
One would have to test the comprehension and reading scores of kids from alphabetic and ideographic backgrounds, at the same ages, to see if that argument held any weight.
I would be interested to know if the effort taken in memorising thousands of symbols has a beneficial effect on brain physiology. It's obviously much more computationally taxing than an alphabetic system: would this lead to better overall working memory ability, or would that be offset by the extra energy it takes to process?
Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font
#6I know nothing of these subjects so I ask: is there any advantage to the typography and scrip system that is simplified Chinese vs a small alphabet a la Latin or Cyrillic?
Hello, I'm the author of this piece. It's a very good question, and the answer may simply be that script systems are inferior, but anecdotally I would say there are two advantages: First, it makes the etymology of the script is very apparent. Often etymology in for example English is very obscure, and requires great leaps of imagination and inference to make the connections. Compare that to the character 灣 referred t…
> and the main thing preventing change may simply be inertia.
And pride. I've noticed the Chinese are quick to defend their writing system, despite its lack of "efficiency". Which is understandable: it is a thing of great beauty, with thousands of years of cultural heritage.
Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font
#7How about comparing with Japanese font? I worked in branding in China. I was told many modern inspirations are from Japanese work. IMHO as a Chinese, they generally have much better taste for art in China.
Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font
#8This may not be in the 'spirit' of typography, but to me it seems like font creation ought to be automatable, to some degree. Artistic flourishes may have to be added in post-production, but the basic shapes (whether Latin or Chinese or whatever) with maybe some constraint engine or machine learning to get the kerning, etc. right could be bulk generated, parameterised by brush style and dynamics and anything else tha…
I believe that kerning is already done that way. Basically you use your glyphs (and popular letter pairs), feed them to an app, it gives you approximate good kerning based on visible gray and possible line crossings. Then the creator adjusts anything that doesn't look completely fine, adds ligatures, etc.
Youtube seems to have a lot of examples. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zCVx9L90ac ?)
Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font
#9This may not be in the 'spirit' of typography, but to me it seems like font creation ought to be automatable, to some degree. Artistic flourishes may have to be added in post-production, but the basic shapes (whether Latin or Chinese or whatever) with maybe some constraint engine or machine learning to get the kerning, etc. right could be bulk generated, parameterised by brush style and dynamics and anything else tha…
Yeah, you're a barbarian, but there is some recent work which tries to find regularities in the dimensioning of Latin typefaces and make them parametric. I saw a relevant talk by this guy: http://www.lettermodel.org/ at a typography conference in Dublin last weekend.
Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font
#10I know nothing of these subjects so I ask: is there any advantage to the typography and scrip system that is simplified Chinese vs a small alphabet a la Latin or Cyrillic?
It's possible that an ideographic writing system is faster to read, presuming one has got over the 'learning thousands of characters' hump without it affecting your ability to comprehend, as you're not converting a representation of sounds into morphemes, and ultimately words, into something meaningful. That is, the characters (or small clusters thereof) are meaningful in their own right, somewhat. That more direct m…
Interesting hypothesis, but apparently Chinese and English read at the same rate http://persquaremile.com/2011/12/21/which-reads-faster-chine...