
Of emoji, Hanzi and alchemy (2015) - mountainplus
https://jealousmarkup.xyz/texts/of-emoji-hanzi-and-alchemy/
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telotortium
I wonder how the visual density of Hanzi vs. Pinyin (or English) compares. On
the one hand, each hanzi is approximately equivalent to about 4 letters of
Pinyin, and Hanzi text uses no spacing (which would otherwise be needed
approximately every 2 Hanzi). On the other hand, apparently Hanzi text should
be approximately 1.3 times the vertical height of Roman text, according to the
article, and Hanzi are square, so significantly wider than a Roman character.
From my observations, it seems that Chinese text ends up slightly denser than
the equivalent English text, but not overwhelmingly so, but surely there
should be an actual comparison somewhere...

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azurezyq
Though varies by different kinds of content, but in reality Chinese is often
noticeably denser, mainly because most Chinese "word"s are less than 2
characters, while much longer in English. Here is a good example:

[http://www.xinhuanet.com//english/2017-06/29/c_136403556.htm](http://www.xinhuanet.com//english/2017-06/29/c_136403556.htm)

It's high quality translation of Chinese Premier's speech.

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Dylan16807
So about twice as dense at the same line size, but it's using much finer
details and shapes. If I want to make sure all the lines are clear, I need to
zoom in to about 150% for the Chinese, while the English has clear lines at
70-80%.

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aikinai
Maybe you're just speaking theoretically, but if you're talking about
practical reading, you certainly don't need all the details. Just like English
(where you can basically read with no more than a rough outline of words), you
can read hanzi with full fluency even with many strokes abbreviated,
illegible, etc.

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Dylan16807
I'm not speaking theoretically at all.

Obviously you can shrink both. But my guess is you need to keep the Chinese
bigger.

I don't know if it's 1:1. I can't read Chinese so I can't give exact
legibility numbers. But when I shrink the text closer to the limits of legible
English, with letters still basically intact, many of the Chinese characters
are completely destroyed (while some are perfectly fine, but with more
information per character losing any of them is much worse).

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aikinai
Sorry, replying very late, but I do read Japanese and you can go very small
and still read it. There’s enough context and humans are incredibly good at
seeing patterns and filling in details.

Early computer fonts, for example, couldn’t fit nearly all the strokes and
could be read just fine.

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faitswulff
This is literally the only time I've heard anyone say anything good about
Skype since they were bought by Microsoft.

