8 ms·

The long process of creating a Chinese font

153 points by f14ist 11y ago

Xophmeister 11y ago
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.
- viraptor 11y ago
  I believe that kerning is already done that way. Basically you use your glyphs (and popular letter pairs), feed them to an app, it gives you approximate good kerning based on visible gray and possible line crossings. Then the creator adjusts anything that doesn't look completely fine, adds ligatures, etc. Youtube seems to have a lot of examples. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zCVx9L90ac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zCVx9L90ac ?)
- theoh 11y ago
  Yeah, you're a barbarian, but there is some recent work which tries to find regularities in the dimensioning of Latin typefaces and make them parametric. I saw a relevant talk by this guy: http://www.lettermodel.org/ http://www.lettermodel.org/ at a typography conference in Dublin last weekend.
- galago 11y ago
  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.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - derefr 11y ago
    > 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?
    - kijin 11y ago
      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.
- cfcef 11y ago
  You might enjoy http://genekogan.com/works/a-book-from-the-sky.html http://genekogan.com/works/a-book-from-the-sky.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10750252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10750252 as a perspective on automated font construction.
- jahewson 11y ago
  This is what Knuth's METAFONT does. It was used to create the Computer Modern typeface. However, overall the results are not very pleasing IMHO.
IgorPartola 11y ago
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?
- nsonnad 11y ago
  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.
  - Xophmeister 11y ago
    > and the main thing preventing change may simply be inertia. And pride. I've noticed the Chinese are quick to defend their writing system, despite its lack of "efficiency". Which is understandable: it is a thing of great beauty, with thousands of years of cultural heritage.
    - mazerackham 11y ago
      Lol, I wouldn't call it out as pride. There might simply be no reason to change. Ideas have been expressed in the written language for thousands of years, and I believe that it's probably as efficient as English. Very different, but similar levels of efficiency. Would it be "pride" if Chinese people questioned why English was full of inconsistencies and why don't they just change those aspects of the language? At the same time, English is a required subject in Chinese, and hopefully as that improves, people here will get the pros (and cons) of both systems.
LiweiZ 11y ago
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.
- be5invis 11y ago
  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.
  - LiweiZ 11y ago
    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.
ppinyin 11y ago
why chinese is so damn hard? (http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html)
danso 11y ago
So what's the Chinese script equivalent of Helvetica vs. Arial, if there is one?
- jcyw 11y ago
  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.
amake 11y ago
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/
- nsonnad 11y ago
  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...
  - amake 11y ago
    > 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.
    - jiyinyiyong 11y ago
      As a Chinese I would say "带电视" or "配有电视", rather than "设有电视".
markbao 11y ago
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.
Ericson2314 11y ago
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.
- be5invis 11y ago
  The shown one is some variant of Weibei (魏碑).
  - Ericson2314 11y ago
    Thanks!
olewhalehunter 11y ago
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
keithnoizu 11y ago
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.

153 points by f14ist 11y ago

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.

viraptor 11y ago
I believe that kerning is already done that way. Basically you use your glyphs (and popular letter pairs), feed them to an app, it gives you approximate good kerning based on visible gray and possible line crossings. Then the creator adjusts anything that doesn't look completely fine, adds ligatures, etc. Youtube seems to have a lot of examples. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zCVx9L90ac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zCVx9L90ac ?)
theoh 11y ago
Yeah, you're a barbarian, but there is some recent work which tries to find regularities in the dimensioning of Latin typefaces and make them parametric. I saw a relevant talk by this guy: http://www.lettermodel.org/ http://www.lettermodel.org/ at a typography conference in Dublin last weekend.
galago 11y ago
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.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- derefr 11y ago
  > 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?
  - kijin 11y ago
    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.
cfcef 11y ago
You might enjoy http://genekogan.com/works/a-book-from-the-sky.html http://genekogan.com/works/a-book-from-the-sky.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10750252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10750252 as a perspective on automated font construction.
jahewson 11y ago
This is what Knuth's METAFONT does. It was used to create the Computer Modern typeface. However, overall the results are not very pleasing IMHO.

IgorPartola 11y ago

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?

nsonnad 11y ago
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.
- Xophmeister 11y ago
  > and the main thing preventing change may simply be inertia. And pride. I've noticed the Chinese are quick to defend their writing system, despite its lack of "efficiency". Which is understandable: it is a thing of great beauty, with thousands of years of cultural heritage.
  - mazerackham 11y ago
    Lol, I wouldn't call it out as pride. There might simply be no reason to change. Ideas have been expressed in the written language for thousands of years, and I believe that it's probably as efficient as English. Very different, but similar levels of efficiency. Would it be "pride" if Chinese people questioned why English was full of inconsistencies and why don't they just change those aspects of the language? At the same time, English is a required subject in Chinese, and hopefully as that improves, people here will get the pros (and cons) of both systems.

LiweiZ 11y ago

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.

be5invis 11y ago
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.
- LiweiZ 11y ago
  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.

ppinyin 11y ago

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

danso 11y ago

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

jcyw 11y ago
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.

amake 11y ago

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/

nsonnad 11y ago
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...
- amake 11y ago
  > 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.
  - jiyinyiyong 11y ago
    As a Chinese I would say "带电视" or "配有电视", rather than "设有电视".

markbao 11y ago

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.

Ericson2314 11y ago

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.

be5invis 11y ago
The shown one is some variant of Weibei (魏碑).
- Ericson2314 11y ago
  Thanks!

olewhalehunter 11y ago

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

keithnoizu 11y ago

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.