If one type of font had to be chosen to represent Chinese typography, it would be the font songti. The word “ti” 体 essentially means “font”, so you can expect to see that word at the end of many font names. In Chinese, the two most commonly used classifications are song ti (sounds like sawng tee), which you could think of as the Chinese serif, and hei ti (sounds like hey tee), similar to a sans-serif. In this sense, popular Chinese fonts classifications are very similar to our own. Though you can’t really place every single font into either a serif or sans-serif category (some fonts, like hand-drawn scripts, don’t really fit under either) these two words are probably the most commonly used font distinctions, bandied about even outside of the design industry. 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. ![]() 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. 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. ![]()
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