The long process of creating a Chinese font • Hacker News Board

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#21

Post by mazerackham » Sat, Dec 19, 2015, 3:26 AM UTC

gozur88 wrote: post #18

azernik wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

Characters aren't necessary words. In Chinese, a lot of phrases are expressed in groupings of 2 characters and 4 characters.

Especially in these 4 character groupings, you can find a lot of efficiency and elegance. It expresses ideas & meaning that would take 20-100 words to fully express.

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#22

Post by mazerackham » Sat, Dec 19, 2015, 3:29 AM UTC

Xophmeister wrote: post #6

nsonnad wrote: post #4

Earlier 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…

> 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.

Lol, I wouldn't call it out as pride. There might simply be no reason to change. Ideas have been expressed in the written language for thousands of years, and I believe that it's probably as efficient as English. Very different, but similar levels of efficiency. Would it be "pride" if Chinese people questioned why English was full of inconsistencies and why don't they just change those aspects of the language?

At the same time, English is a required subject in Chinese, and hopefully as that improves, people here will get the pros (and cons) of both systems.

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#23

Post by derefr » Sat, Dec 19, 2015, 3:49 AM UTC

galago wrote: post #14

Xophmeister wrote: post #2

This 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…

> To do quality work, a lot of manual adjustment is necessary.

But should that adjustment result in manual one-off changes, or should it result in a new tweak being taught to a system that can then apply it anywhere else that problem happens?

In other words, why can't we build fonts the way we build Text-to-Speech voices?

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#24

Post by swang » Sat, Dec 19, 2015, 3:51 AM UTC

Xophmeister wrote: post #6

nsonnad wrote: post #4

Earlier 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…

> 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.

Which "Chinese"? Your point seems to miss where the pride lays.

There is a lot infighting since the Communist in the 50s/60s decided to create simplified Chinese. Traditionalists would argue that simplified Chinese writing is not as elegant/pretty as traditional (I agree, although I have a bias as I grew up in a country that kept traditional Chinese) but the dominance of China has forced almost every other place in the world that writes in Chinese to use simplified. This includes Japan, which I believe a large majority of their signs are written in simplified version of kanji.

And this spills over into the U.S. where the Chinese who have lived here (which would consist mostly of Hong Kong and Taiwanese) are now fighting (or have fought) the recently immigrated Chinese from China over which system to use in U.S. schools.

So there is a lot of pride, but maybe not in the way you believe.

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#25

Post by amake » Sat, Dec 19, 2015, 4:40 AM UTC

An interesting article. I am very glad for the recent flourishing of CJK fonts, both paid and free (see e.g. Noto fonts including Noto CJK[1])

Some feedback:

> Here an Arphic edit suggests aligning the bottom of the character 磋 with its top part, writing in red ink, “don’t shift right.” The character, as it happens, is cuo, and means “error.”

1. The character in the image is 蹉, not 磋.

2. The red edit text says 下偏右 = "the bottom is shifted right", not 不偏右 = "don't shift right".

[1] https://www.google.com/get/noto/help/cjk/

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#26

Post by amake » Sat, Dec 19, 2015, 5:18 AM UTC

swang wrote: post #24

Xophmeister wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Which "Chinese"? Your point seems to miss where the pride lays. There is a lot infighting since the Communist in the 50s/60s decided to create simplified Chinese. Traditionalists would argue that simplified Chinese writing is not as elegant/pretty as traditional (I agree, although I have a bias as I grew up in a country that kept traditional Chinese) but the dominance of China has forced almost every other place in t…

> This includes Japan, which I believe a large majority of their signs are written in simplified version of kanji.

Japanese simplification has some overlap with Chinese, but overall they are not the same, and the simplification was definitely not "forced" on Japan by China.

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#27

Post by nsonnad » Sat, Dec 19, 2015, 5:57 AM UTC

amake wrote: post #25

An interesting article. I am very glad for the recent flourishing of CJK fonts, both paid and free (see e.g. Noto fonts including Noto CJK[1]) Some feedback: > Here an Arphic edit suggests aligning the bottom of the character 磋 with its top part, writing in red ink, “don’t shift right.” The character, as it happens, is cuo, and means “error.” 1. The character in the image is 蹉, not 磋. 2. The red edit text says 下偏右 =…

Author here. Thanks for the comments, I have fixed both points. The first one I assure you was just a typo, the second, I read too quickly and could have sworn there was another stroke there originally...

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#28

Post by be5invis » Sat, Dec 19, 2015, 6:03 AM UTC

LiweiZ wrote: post #7

How 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.

Most Chinese fonts contain more Han glyphs compared to Japanese, especially traditional. Most traditional Chinese fonts will have over 10,000 glyphs, while simplified are about 7,000. Many foundaries will create a even larger one, with over 22,000 glyphs in a single typeface.

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#29

Post by desdiv » Sat, Dec 19, 2015, 7:37 AM UTC

amake wrote: post #26

swang wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which "Chinese"? Your point seems to miss where the pride lays. There is a lot infighting since the Communist in the 50s/60s decided to create simplified Chinese. Traditionalists would argue that simplified Chinese writing is not as elegant/pretty as traditional (I agree, although I have a bias as I grew up in a country that kept traditional Chinese) but the dominance of China has forced almost every other place in t…

> This includes Japan, which I believe a large majority of their signs are written in simplified version of kanji. Japanese simplification has some overlap with Chinese, but overall they are not the same, and the simplification was definitely not "forced" on Japan by China.

To add to that, China's simplification process happened during the 50s and 60s, back when China was deeply impoverished, had massive famines thanks to the Great Leap Forward[0], and had basically zero international influence (didn't even have a UN seat). They weren't in a position to influence Japan in any way. Not to mention that Japan was in the opposite camp during the Cold War.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#30

Post by amake » Sat, Dec 19, 2015, 7:41 AM UTC

nsonnad wrote: post #27

amake wrote: post #25

An interesting article. I am very glad for the recent flourishing of CJK fonts, both paid and free (see e.g. Noto fonts including Noto CJK[1]) Some feedback: > Here an Arphic edit suggests aligning the bottom of the character 磋 with its top part, writing in red ink, “don’t shift right.” The character, as it happens, is cuo, and means “error.” 1. The character in the image is 蹉, not 磋. 2. The red edit text says 下偏右 =…

Author here. Thanks for the comments, I have fixed both points. The first one I assure you was just a typo, the second, I read too quickly and could have sworn there was another stroke there originally...

> I read too quickly and could have sworn there was another stroke there originally

Funny how the meaning ended up basically the same either way.

I'm reminded of a situation where I made a similar mistake (misread one character for another) but the meaning ended up the opposite: There was a hotel room listing that noted 设有电视 ("equipped with TV"). At the time simplified hanzi were still a bit new to me, so I misread ⻈ as ⺡ and thus in my mind it became 没有电视 ("has no TV").

I thought this was an odd thing to advertise, but that maybe it was simply a cultural difference.