why chinese is so damn hard? (http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html)
The long process of creating a Chinese font
11–20 of 56 posts
Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font
#12So what's the Chinese script equivalent of Helvetica vs. Arial, if there is one?
Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font
#13So what's the Chinese script equivalent of Helvetica vs. Arial, if there is one?
The most well known ones would be Sung and Ming, and Ching. Emphasis are on ratio of width of horizontal or vertical strokes. And they are always sans, with little triangle at the end of strokes.
Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font
#14This 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…
It is automated. Also a lot of fonts are basically built off of other fonts. There are automation tools to systematically alter them. To do quality work, a lot of manual adjustment is necessary.
http://doc.robofont.com/documentation/welcome-to-robofont/
Chinese typesetting software had traditionally included a glyph editor so that one could add a character that isn't supported by a font. However, that's not something people want to do very often. It also involves re-inventing the wheel. Its better if one team spends years making the font comprehensive and well designed.
Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font
#15This 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…
It is automated. Also a lot of fonts are basically built off of other fonts. There are automation tools to systematically alter them. To do quality work, a lot of manual adjustment is necessary. http://doc.robofont.com/documentation/welcome-to-robofont/ Chinese typesetting software had traditionally included a glyph editor so that one could add a character that isn't supported by a font. However, that's not something…
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Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font
#16This 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…
You might enjoy http://genekogan.com/works/a-book-from-the-sky.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10750252 as a perspective on automated font construction.
Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font
#17I 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…
It can also, as my Japanese textbook pointed out, be faster to read if you're familiar with the characters in a body of text. Like the difference between reading "one hundred forty-three" vs "143". It's the input that kills you.
But I think computer/smartphone semi-phonetic input kind of gets you the best of both worlds.
Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It can also, as my Japanese textbook pointed out, be faster to read if you're familiar with the characters in a body of text. Like the difference between reading "one hundred forty-three" vs "143". It's the input that kills you. But I think computer/smartphone semi-phonetic input kind of gets you the best of both worlds.
I'm skeptical of the "quick to read" argument. An educated Chinese speaker generally knows something in the neighborhood of 5,000 characters ("full literacy" is supposed to be 3k-4k), which is far less than readers of phonetic systems (20k-35k). Unless you're a professional writer of some variety you're going to spend more time looking up words in Chinese.
Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
It can also, as my Japanese textbook pointed out, be faster to read if you're familiar with the characters in a body of text. Like the difference between reading "one hundred forty-three" vs "143". It's the input that kills you. But I think computer/smartphone semi-phonetic input kind of gets you the best of both worlds.
I'm skeptical of the "quick to read" argument. An educated Chinese speaker generally knows something in the neighborhood of 5,000 characters ("full literacy" is supposed to be 3k-4k), which is far less than readers of phonetic systems (20k-35k). Unless you're a professional writer of some variety you're going to spend more time looking up words in Chinese.
I am not familiar with Chinese, but in Japanese, the characters do not necessarily map 1 to 1 with words, so you have some words that are composed of multiple characters. For example, "adult" would be written as 大人, which are the characters "big" and "person".
Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
It can also, as my Japanese textbook pointed out, be faster to read if you're familiar with the characters in a body of text. Like the difference between reading "one hundred forty-three" vs "143". It's the input that kills you. But I think computer/smartphone semi-phonetic input kind of gets you the best of both worlds.
I'm skeptical of the "quick to read" argument. An educated Chinese speaker generally knows something in the neighborhood of 5,000 characters ("full literacy" is supposed to be 3k-4k), which is far less than readers of phonetic systems (20k-35k). Unless you're a professional writer of some variety you're going to spend more time looking up words in Chinese.
Many Chinese words are two characters in length.