
The long process of creating a Chinese font - f14ist
http://qz.com/522079/the-long-incredibly-tortuous-and-fascinating-process-of-creating-a-chinese-font/
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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](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.

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be5invis
The shown one is some variant of Weibei (魏碑).

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Ericson2314
Thanks!

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amake
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/](https://www.google.com/get/noto/help/cjk/)

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nsonnad
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...

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amake
> 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.

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jiyinyiyong
As a Chinese I would say "带电视" or "配有电视", rather than "设有电视".

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LiweiZ
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.

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be5invis
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.

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LiweiZ
If starting from scratch, yes, it could be very different and requires much
more work. However, in many cases, I highly doubt this is what happened.

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IgorPartola
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?

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nsonnad
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 to in the piece, which means "bay" and contains the
"water radical." The etymology can be made more clear in this way.

Second, the script is agnostic to how the characters are pronounced. This is
what has allowed it to be used for several languages in China (often
inaccurately referred to as "dialects")—which are often pronounced completely
differently—for hundreds of years.

That said, there are clearly many, many disadvantages, and the main thing
preventing change may simply be inertia.

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azernik
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.

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gozur88
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.

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gizmo686
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".

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jessriedel
Sure, but the script speed-reading advantage only comes at the level of having
single symbols for single meaning. Once you need to combine symbols to get the
(additional) meanings, you're not any faster than phonetics.

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Xophmeister
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 that can be simulated.

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galago
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/](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.

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derefr
> 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?

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kijin
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.

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ppinyin
why chinese is so damn hard?
([http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html](http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html))

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markbao
Fascinating article – and they did a great job with the Optima-inspired
typeface. I'm not usually a fan of Optima, but as a Chinese font, it looks
really fresh amidst the more boring traditional fonts.

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keithnoizu
That seems like something you could partially mitigate by vectorizing fonts
and applying transformation and brush stroke rules to generate a base font you
could then tweak as appropriate. Eg. Rules for how pronounced curves should
be, serifs, spacing. Etc.

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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

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danso
So what's the Chinese script equivalent of Helvetica vs. Arial, if there is
one?

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jcyw
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.

