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"standard 12pt font" is biased for latin characters, though - at the larger font size, the Chinese characters are still getting much better information compress
by T-R 10y ago
"standard 12pt font" is biased for latin characters, though - at the larger font size, the Chinese characters are still getting much better information compression than the latin characters, which need to expand horizontally by using several characters per unit of meaning, plus separators (spacing and hyphens) to even be readable. In practice, even adjusting for font size, paragraphs of Chinese and Japanese are almost always shorter than latin-language equivalents.
Of course, the real winner of this argument is probably Korean.
- yongjik 10y agoActually, I think Korean is not a winner. Its block-shape dictates that a character like 이 take the same amount of space as 핥, so there's a limit on how small a character goes. (There are fonts that try to break out of the standard square shape, but I don't think any found wide use.) I think proportional fonts have a better space utilization by their nature. Anyways, I don't think that's an important metric. It's not like we live in an age where paper is scarce.