

The Roman typefaces used in Chinese and Japanese text - mzehrer
http://bellisk.blogspot.com/2012/05/roman-typefaces-used-in-chinese-and.html

======
vincvinc
Spotting the particulars of what people native to a different script do when
using another is one of my hobbies.

\- East-asian students will have a hard time spotting typos even in important
words as their own name

\- Even on designs with the most extravagant typography choices for their
native fonts, choices for roman fonts are not prioritized

\- "Letter people" do the same thing the other way around ("OK, we got a nice
asian feel to this poster ... now to add some cool chinese characters...
done") It's exactly the same feeling for people used to seeing asian scripts,
to see the basic printed version everywhere and the same old standard fonts.

Next time you make something using a foreign script, please keep in mind that
how you're looking at it != how natives look at it!

For more on different traditional script styles see
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_script_styles](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_script_styles)
However, the best information on font choices for Ch, Jp and Kor is in the
languages themselves, unfortunately.

~~~
3rd3
Can you give some examples of the boring standard font vs. more sophisticated
Chinese font faces?

~~~
apaprocki
Related -- Due to Han unification[1], many glyphs you see on the screen in
different languages share the same Unicode codepoint. The problem with this is
that you no longer have an easy one-to-one mapping to have certain languages
render in a desired font. It just so happens that Chinese business users
prefer a much more traditional font than Japanese users. This doesn't
necessarily affect "documents" that can have a defined language, because the
language selection will be taken into account when the font is chosen. When
you are writing software, however, that can mix any/all available languages on
one screen (e.g. displaying a list of news headlines or even tweets), the
programmer has to make a hard choice whether to do all the extra work to send
down an explicit language tag (if one exists) next to each group of text
elements that share the language so the font system can choose the correct
font for a codepoint such as U+5168. If that work is not done (or parts of the
pipeline don't carry that information along), the best you can have is a
global setting that users can pick "I favor Japanese fonts" and then a Chinese
headline could wind up rendered in two fonts -- all of the unified Han
codepoints rendering in a much more modern looking Japanese font.

edit: [1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification)

------
desdiv
I couldn't find the exact page the author used, so I took a screenshot of that
"ancient virus" story instead. This[1] is how it looks on a standard _English_
Ubuntu 14.04 system (no tweaking and no extra Chinese fonts installed). The
English in it doesn't look half bad; there's even kerning!

As an aside, if you look at the top of my screenshot, you'll see a little
lyric display on my taskbar. I use it to learn Japanese while I listen to
anime songs. I wrote it in Python3 and there was _not a single instance_ where
I had to bother with Unicode or encoding issues.

    
    
       with open(file) as f:
           lines = f.readlines()
    

works as is on Japanese files; I don't even have to supply the encoding. PyGTK
and Gnome handles the Japanese text perfectly when I pass it to them. I'm
throughly impressed by how far we've come in terms of Unicode support in
programming languages, libraries, and the OS.

[1][http://i.imgur.com/rLNVchh.png](http://i.imgur.com/rLNVchh.png)

------
ddxv
ｉ ｗｏｒｋ ｉｎ ｃｈｉｎａ，ｆｅｅｌｓ ｌｉｋｅ ｈａｌｆ ｍｙ ｊｏｂ ｉｓ ａｄｄｉｎｇ ＆ ｓｕｂｔｒａｃｔｉｎｇ ｓｐａｃｅｓ ｆｒｏｍ ｔｈｅ
ｓｔｒａｎｇｅ ｔｙｐｅ ｆａｃｅ ｈｅｒｅ．

~~~
masklinn
Unicode-wise, "ｗ" {U+FF57 FULLWIDTH LATIN SMALL LETTER W} is the composition
of the compatibility tag "<wide>" and {U+0077 LATIN SMALL LETTER W}. You can
get rid of the compatibility tags by using NFK* (normal form _compatibility_
):

    
    
        >>> s = "ｉ　ｗｏｒｋ　ｉｎ　ｃｈｉｎａ，ｆｅｅｌｓ　ｌｉｋｅ　ｈａｌｆ　ｍｙ　ｊｏｂ　ｉｓ　ａｄｄｉｎｇ　＆　ｓｕｂｔｒａｃｔｉｎｇ　ｓｐａｃｅｓ　ｆｒｏｍ　ｔｈｅ　ｓｔｒａｎｇｅ　ｔｙｐｅ　ｆａｃｅ　ｈｅｒｅ．" 
        >>> import unicodedata
        >>> print(unicodedata.normalize('NFKC', s))
        i work in china,feels like half my job is adding & subtracting spaces from the strange type face here.
    

It doesn't actually have to do with typefaces, the typeface is just the system
trying to find a font able to display those specific glyphs, which are
compatibility forms for dot-matrix printers and fixed-width terminals:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfwidth_and_fullwidth_forms](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfwidth_and_fullwidth_forms)

I'm guessing their continued use is because there are also aesthetic
considerations at play for native readers, for whom variable-width latin
script could look plain weird.

------
est
Note to HN readers: the final display is also relevant to your system's
installed fonts and rendering priority settings.

Op's screenshot is also different from what normal Chinese user could see.

I can't find op's screenshot of the exact linked page, but here is my on
rMBP+Safari screenshot anyway

[http://edu.qq.com/BBC.htm](http://edu.qq.com/BBC.htm)

[http://i.imgur.com/s7OCT2S.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/s7OCT2S.jpg)

~~~
masklinn
The screenshot looks like a mobile version for a feature-ish phone. Which
could explain the use of fullwidth characters (expectations of encoding or
hardware limitations)

------
Doctor_Fegg
The parallel that springs to mind is that they look very similar to the NLQ
fonts ('Near Letter Quality') used by dot matrix printers in the 1980s/1990s -
and made, for the most part, by Japanese manufacturers: Epson, Star Micronics,
etc.

At the time, NLQ was a passable imitation of real typesetting. But somehow it
looks like that style has become fossilised as "how you write Roman
characters".

------
lispython
The biggest problem might be compatibility, old computers (common in China)
only contain fonts that have low quality Roman parts like SimSun
([http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E6%98%93%E5%AE%8B%E4%...](http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E6%98%93%E5%AE%8B%E4%BD%93))
but this font is default Chinese typeface in Windows.

The newly designed fonts in recent years for Chinese have much better Roman
parts which are already distributed by operating system or could obtained for
free:

\- Microsoft YaHei in Windows [http://www.fonts.com/font/microsoft-
corporation#product_top](http://www.fonts.com/font/microsoft-
corporation#product_top)

\- Hiragino Sans GB in Mac ([http://blog.jjgod.org/2009/06/04/updates-on-font-
changes-in-...](http://blog.jjgod.org/2009/06/04/updates-on-font-changes-in-
snow-leopard/))

\- Source Han Sans free from Adobe
([http://blog.typekit.com/2014/07/15/introducing-source-han-
sa...](http://blog.typekit.com/2014/07/15/introducing-source-han-sans/))

Many Chinese websites have already using one of them as their default font.
There are also a dozen of commercial Chinese fonts which contain higher
quality Roman typeface (although could not catch up most classic ones).

And for professionals (like book publishers or designers) in China, they often
combine one Chinese font and one Roman font in their product for better
result. (e.g. FZNew ShuSong + Sabon for Serif).

------
graup
> I assume this is similar for Japanese and Korean

FYI Korean script (Hangul) is actually an alphabet, so relatively easy to
type.

Still, the topic of font choices remains interesting. While we have been
accustomed to very differently looking typefaces for Roman scripts for a few
hundred years, we know relatively little about CJK fonts. Does anyone know a
good article describing Asian font choices in English?

It's not just "symbols" \- there's different ways to draw these lines, too,
taking into account the purpose of the design.

~~~
masklinn
> FYI Korean script (Hangul) is actually an alphabet, so relatively easy to
> type.

Japanese is typed using kana, though they're syllabaries and have about twice
the number of characters as hangul, the end-result is mostly similar (so is
the on-the-fly transformative effect, in japanese kana entry is transformed
into kanji OTF, in hangul jamo get merged into natsori).

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Japanese _can_ be typed as kana, but most people type rōmaji (Latin
characters).

~~~
wodenokoto
Most people on a computer. Most people type kana on their phone.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Yes, that's true. Japanese is, luckily, a language quite suited to cellphone
number pad input.

------
mproud
Part of the reason for the “weirdness” is the blatant fact they’re fixed-
width, which is hugely important as so are kanji. That way you can intermix
the two and the spacing won’t completely fall apart.

~~~
IsTom
Monospace fonts are fixed-width too and they don't look bad. The thing is that
they're full-width.

------
vkolencik
It reminds me of how old German books written in Schwabacher used roman
typeface for Latin and other foreign words. In this case, it was intentional,
but I have always found it a bit irritating from the aesthetic standpoint. For
example:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua%E2%80%93Fraktur_dispute...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua%E2%80%93Fraktur_dispute#mediaviewer/File:Initialen.jpg)

~~~
dded
Similar to how we Americans put foreign words in italics, no? Does that look
aesthetically irritating to others?

------
dheera
Ugh. I've done a lot of graphic design in Chinese, English, and bi-lingual
documents and I absolutely hate that Roman typeface.

There are just far better fixed-width serif fonts out there and I always have
to replace the English characters within Chinese documents with those fonts (I
usually try to find one that matches in weight and blends in). Also not to
mention a lot of English text within Chinese documents does not need to be in
a fixed-width font to look good. There's a reason why there exist separate
Unicode points for the fixed-width English characters when you do need them.

------
sanxiyn
[http://hangeul.naver.com/](http://hangeul.naver.com/) is a Korean typography
and font distribution site by Naver.

------
saurik
So, do speakers of these languages (maybe specifically in countries where this
language is natively spoken) prefer these typefaces? As in, should I purposely
be using these typefaces for "small snippets of English embedded in a page
that is otherwise written in Chinese or Japanese" when I am optimizing content
for these audiences?

~~~
barry-cotter
A/B test it, it's the only way to be sure. I doubt most people can CJ(K) can
even tell the difference. When proof reading Germans' English texts, one of
the things that was regularly necessary was fixing punctuation to use English
commas and apostrophes. I did this for people doing English degrees. Normal
people will not notice this on any (conscious) level without
training/education in it. It's like how you never noticed bad kerning before
you knew what kerning was (typography, the gift that keeps on giving).

~~~
saurik
I did not specify whether the preference would be conscious or unconscious,
and I disagree that me running the A/B test myself instead of asking if anyone
else already knows the answer to the question already (maybe by having run
experiments themselves) is the only way to be sure (well, OK, it is always the
case that people I am targeting might be different than other people already
studied, but at that point there is no longer any value in trying to learn
things as a species at all, which is a pointless precision).

------
iSnow
I like this breed of fonts, they remind me of the LaTeX "Computer modern" and
Garamond of old.

