Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The long process of creating a Chinese font

qz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 56 posts

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#31

Post by jahewson »

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…

This is what Knuth's METAFONT does. It was used to create the Computer Modern typeface. However, overall the results are not very pleasing IMHO.

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#33

Post by Ericson2314 »

I've always hated the mingti--serif comparison. Mingti looks too artificial and beholden to technology (woodblock printing) for that to hold up. And kaiti likewise is too caligraphic and human to fit the bill either. With both of those constrained by their orignal medium enough to count as skeuomorphism---call me out on bias as a western or non-mason, but serifs don't evoke stone-inscribing as obviously to me---I was about to give up and say there is no serif analog.

But what font is this? https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/yan-rad1.png (from the article), is definitely not JinXuan, and I think is the "most serif" Chinese font I've seen. It's definitely a Kaiti first and foremost, which I consider a necessary traditionalism for this analogy. Yet, the general boxiness of the strokes, especially the cusps on the corner of the boxes/kou3, defy the practicalities of brush-strokes (e.g.. harder to do tangency-breaks) and evoke the "cuspiness" of serifs.

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#34

Post by be5invis »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #33

I've always hated the mingti--serif comparison. Mingti looks too artificial and beholden to technology (woodblock printing) for that to hold up. And kaiti likewise is too caligraphic and human to fit the bill either. With both of those constrained by their orignal medium enough to count as skeuomorphism---call me out on bias as a western or non-mason, but serifs don't evoke stone-inscribing as obviously to me---I was…

The shown one is some variant of Weibei (魏碑).

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#35

Post by swang »

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.

After looking this up, yeah you are right. I just assumed there was a conversion of Traditional->Simplified for the most part because I had noticed earlier in my life that most of the written forms of kanji (I saw) were written in traditional form and only towards the past decade or so have I noticed that there were more characters that looked "simplified"

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#36

Post by ww520 »

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.

The permutation of those 3k,4k,5k characters when combined into 2-character word or 3-character word are huge.

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#37

Post by olewhalehunter »

there are radicals and stroke patterns that can be recorded as chains of geometric macros and plugged into common reverse stroke-to-text tools found online, adjusting parameters or introducing custom paint motifs on this would produce fonts trivially; text character dictionary -> lookup in stroke recognizer -> algorithmic painting around strokes

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#38

Post by kijin »

derefr wrote: post #23
galago wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Text-to-speech voices sound pretty awkward. To make them sound less awkward, you have to either tweak the software for all sorts of special cases or pre-record a bunch of phrases. Both of these take a lot of manpower.

Fonts are the same, except they're used by many more people and last much longer than that brief moment when your text-to-speech software stumbles on an uncommon combination of words.

I'm sure that the technology will rapidly improve as more and more Chinese fonts are needed, but as long as AI remains inferior to humans in some way, I don't see it getting all automated.

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#39

Post by meric »

IgorPartola wrote: post #3

I 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?

Well, politically speaking a script system, by nature of its inertia, looks like it can hold a nation together a lot longer than Latin. Latin was the language of the Roman Empire, but evolution over the centuries means written Romance languages are no longer mutually intelligible. Today the former Roman Empire is split into dozens of states. Whereas, for Chinese, the number of states[1] is three. China, Taiwan, Singapore.

[1] the use in this case means the region in question has its own military.

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#40

Post by taejo »

nsonnad wrote: post #4
IgorPartola wrote: post #3

I 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…

The "etymology" you speak of (and is often used in a Chinese context) has nothing to do with actual etymology. The origin of characters is barely related at all to the origins of words.

The word 灣 wān (= bay, cove) might be related to 彎 wān (= curve, bend) but the character doesn't tell us that; it's certainly not related to 水 shuǐ (= water) which appears in 灣 as 氵.

灣 wān also provides an excellent example of where the "character etymology" definitely isn't the actual origin of the word. 臺灣 Táiwān (= Taiwan) is made of characters meaning "terrace" and "cove", so you might think aha, Taiwan has a purely Chinese etymology from "Terrace Cove", but in fact it's unrelated: it's from Siraya (an indigenous Taiwanese language) Tay-uan (= sea people).

Post reply on HN