This question has been plaguing me for literally years.
I’ve asked tons of people and nobody knew.
OK, so basically, fonts for scripts that use an alphabet are made by someone drawing them in Photoshop or whatever. That isn’t too big of a mystery.
But how do they do it for, say, Chinese? Do they draw each character individually?
Or do they draw the components and assemble them somehow?
For instance, I was thinking for the character 技 perhaps they draw it by hand or maybe they have 扌 and 支 already ready for use in all characters that need them and they just paste them together.
If that makes sense.
But in any case, it seems much more time consuming to make Chinese fonts. Are there methods used to make it faster?
I notice sometimes one character in a font looks odd. So that lends evidence to the possibility that they are all drawn by hand. But I don’t know!
I’m not sure I understand your question, but I’ll try. Chinese characters and Japanese Kanji, which are derived from Chinese characters may consist of elements that look like two characters placed together, because in essence they are. Individual elements (depending on the character) in most kanji are called radicals. There are 216 radicals that can be used as elements to form more complex characters.
To give you a very simple example of radical use in a kanji, in my custom title below my user name is the character 好, which means ‘fond of’, or ‘pleasing’, and is made from two characters: 女, which means woman, and 子, which means child. In the case of 好, 女 is the radical.
In addition, characters can be made up of 4, 5, 6, or more individual elements. Also, the meaning of a kanji may not necessarily be very easily, if at all, determined by taking the meanings of the individual elements.
I can’t tell you anything specific about Chinese fonts, however in general a lot goes into the design of major fonts. Simply drawing the characters is not sufficient for scalable fonts. Different sizes have different issues with minimum stroke size, and the finer details that can be rendered in larger sizes have to be created at high resolution in order to scale properly. Also many quality fonts are defined in mathematical terms and not as images. Any quality font will be examined at standard sizes and will be tweaked by hand to provide the designer’s desired appearance. Designers do often use component systems even for the simpler western fonts. It cuts down the initial design time, but not the time taken to polish a font. There are fonts used for computers, and maybe mechanical printing, that use overstrikes to form single characters out of multiple, but I don’t know if that’s used in Chinese.
Japanese fonts are made the same way other fonts are made. Commonly used programs are OTEdit/TTEdit, Fontographer and FontLab Studio, the last one being the more commonly used by professionals.
Essentially creating a new Japanese font face is a tremendous amount of work, which is why there are generally much fewer high quality Japanese fonts than roman fonts. Although the thousands of kanji are built from a smaller set of common parts, you can’t just do a simple copy and paste to make a new character. The balance, placement, stroke width, etc. of each part is important.
Now, I’m not particularly knowledgable about any of the software packages I mentioned but I wouldn’t by surprised if they had tools to assist you in reusing and scaling parts. That being said, it pretty much boils down to a lot of work.
By the way, if you can read Japanese, or want to give automated translation a try, I found an interesting blog post covering a seminar about font design. The second half has a detailed explanation of how a designer goes about designing a new character. Essentially, he has a collection of vector parts he assembles and modifies by hand to create a new glyph. Looks like a lot of work.
I’ve been studying Chinese for years and know thousands of characters so I do know how characters are composed. Thank you though and sorry that my question wasn’t clear. I don’t know much about typography.
(I didn’t use the word “radical” in the opening post since as I understand it, not every element used in characters is technically a radical.)
TriPolar & jovan:
Thanks for the answers. I actually found a source online saying that even English fonts can have thousands of characters, which was kind of weird. I guess that includes all sorts of strange characters we rarely use.
I’m still a bit interested in to what extent characters are hand drawn versus resizing and things like that.
[edit] Ooh, thanks!
I can’t really read Japanese but it’s still the most helpful thing I’ve found.
And I notice that the character 好, though composed of 女 and 子, is a compressed version of them, exactly as I’d expect. It seems to be comparable to a Roman ligature.
I actually use this character in my classes to talk about Gestalt principles because 女子 means “girl” and 好 means “to like” but you’d never confuse the two while reading. That being said it’s not much like a ligature, because 好 is a single character. Characters in Japanese have all the same size, which is why the parts look squished together. Many characters have far more than two parts.
Very similar to Chinese. One version “to like” is 就好, where 好 is “good” (or done). 女子 Could be something like “woman thing” whereas “woman” is usually drawn 女人 (woman person if we want to try to be literal which is always a bad thing in any language).
I don’t know if this will work, but the Chinese word 真 (meaning real) is supposed to have 3 parallel lines in the box, but is often rendered with 2 (like 目) because of lack of space. I think if you zoom in on this page, or copy that word into Word and change the size, you’ll see it changes from 2 to 3 lines at large sizes.
All the Chinese people I’ve asked think there are only meant to be 2 lines in the box! Such is the influence of electronic text.
I don’t know why you would think that Chinese fonts are created any differently than Latin fonts. They all need to go through the same process of each character being drawn individually - these days in Adobe Illustrator, although many designers like to work by hand initially then scan their drawings. The finished design is then imported into a font editing programme to set spaces between characters.
Hmm . . . do you have experience with Chinese characters?
I ask because there are thousands, each consisting of many variations of the ~200 radicals.
It seems way too time consuming to draw them all by hand and make them look uniform. I was wondering what techniques were used to achieve this. I have a few speculations, but I suppose there’s no reason to put them here.
(Although as I noted above, sometimes they don’t all look perfectly uniform.)
And all characters (in Chinese) take up the same amount of space so I’m not sure what you mean by the last bit.
I really cannot imagine anyone draws thousands of characters by hand and scans them individually. Is that true?
Given your name “Tokyo” I’m suspecting this may be one of many issues where there is a different Japanese variant of a character than the traditional Chinese characters.
I also doubt there are many literate Chinese people who don’t know such a common word has three strokes in there.
Sounds like one of those myths you hear sometimes in language learning circles like “90% of Chinese don’t know how to write scissors in their own language!”
It’s meant to encourage you as the naive learner.
Yeah, this link shows it with 3 lines. And if you still don’t believe me, copy that word into Word and increase the font size.
Well, I only asked 2 people… but you can try asking others. Write the 2 line version down and ask people “what word is this?” or “is this the Chinese word for real?” I think it’s akin to native speakers being sloppy with their own language. Like their, there, they’re. Would of. Your, you’re.