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We have blackletter, script, display, slab, monospace, and a handful of other words that indicate a general typographic style. Western language fonts are classified under a few major headings and a pantheon of minor ones. Major Classifications of Popular Chinese Fonts Only recently have some extremely experimental technologies emerged for Chinese non-standard webfont rendering, like Youziku and Justfont. Because Chinese font files contain so many glyphs, they usually run from about 3–7 MB per font weight, a size which defies web embedding (and which partially explains why Flash maintained its popularity here for so long). China’s not on the boat at all-they’re still stuck with their original browser standard fonts and PNG/SVG for special type. Non-professional fonts will sometimes squeak by with as few as 2,000 of the most common glyphs, but these shouldn't be used for base body text, as you'll inevitably run into a character you need but don't have. Traditional character sets have been known to run to 30,000 or higher. That includes the English alphabet, English and Chinese punctuation, and a big ol’ dictionary of Chinese characters.

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Oh, many pardons-did I not drop that bomb already? Despite simplification, professional simplified Chinese fonts must include a glyph count approximately 20,000 strong, sometimes a few thousand more, sometimes a few thousand less. And that doesn’t even take multiple font weights (thicknesses) into account.

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Think about what all that history means for font foundries: to release a pro Chinese typography font, they not only have to create a character set of at least around 20,000 characters, they have to do it twice: once for Simplified and once for Traditional.

Incorporated into languages which forked off Chinese before the simplification, like Japanese, Korean, and retro Vietnamese.Ĭon-fu-sing! Hallelujah, It’s Raining Glyphs.

In extremely formal usage in Mainland China, like official place names or titles.

On antique documents written in Mainland China prior to 1954.

In Chinatowns established outside of China.

As the official written language of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau.

Where Traditional Chinese font type characters are used:

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As the official written language of Mainland China, used everywhere from around 1954–64, from TV subtitles to product packaging.Where Simplified Chinese font type characters are used: There were also a bazillion Chinese immigrant communities and Chinatowns that had been established overseas before the new language was released they also kept the traditional characters. The thing is, Mao wasn’t the boss of Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Macau at the time, so they never made the switch, instead keeping the original, traditional Chinese typography. Wikipedia tells us: “The PRC issued its first round of official character simplifications in two documents, the first in 1956 and the second in 1964.” So he rounded up some linguists and they got busy. Long story short, after Chairman Mao and the Communists came into power in 1949, Mao decided that he could raise national literacy rates by decreasing the complexity of the language. Simplified Chinese Font Typesĭid you know there are two standard versions of written Chinese? Who doesn’t like looking at pretty things? Because Nothing’s That Easy: Traditional vs. Many of those languages, though they've evolved into something unique and distinct, still include Chinese characters today. As far as anyone knows, Chinese is the world’s oldest in-use writing system, and most of the major East Asian written languages are kind of like GitHub forks of written Chinese. That might be you someday, no?įrom a learner’s perspective, Chinese typography is just flat-out cool.

Why You Should Careįrom a practical perspective, I’m getting an increasing number of calls from web and graphic designers who are being asked to produce Chinese-language versions of printed and digital materials. How many glyphs are there in a Chinese font type set? Does Chinese have “serifs” and “sans-serifs”? What is the Helvetica of the Chinese font world? We’ll answer all these questions and more as we cannonball into the deep end of East Asian and Chinese typography.

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