![]() ![]() ![]() There is also a large shareware Unicode fonts, Code2000. Many of Microsoft’s operating systems and applications come with additional Unicode fonts, and Office 2000 onwards includes Arial Unicode MS, which includes all of the characters in version 2.0 of the Unicode standard. The core fonts ( Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New) for Windows platforms were converted to Unicode even before Microsoft changed to the 16-bit WGL4 character set (652 characters) in place of the 8-bit ANSI character set (256 characters), and the numbers of characters in these fonts has continued to increase. Bitstream also had an experimental Unicode font, CyberBit, freely available from Netscape for several years. One of the first was Lucida Sans Unicode from Bigelow & Holmes, supplied with a pre-release SDK for Microsoft Windows NT 3.1 in March 1993. The number of Windows TrueType and OpenType fonts that support Unicode is slowly increasing. Links to font-related and language-related Web sites.I’ll be sure to edit appropriately as I learn. Going to visit Hong Kong to coincide with our launch of Chinese was invaluable, and I highly recommend it to anyone working in a script they aren’t literate in.įinally, I fully expect to be corrected on some of the above. My understanding is that up/down and left/right is for non-Chinese eastern languages, and a slightly outdated way of writing.įor me, launching a full service in Chinese was an incredibly interesting experience. Generally left-to-right writing seems to work ok. Building a site in Chinese means forgoing this automatic decision.ġ0. Western fonts load lightly, therefore we can have custom fonts easily. Afterwards, choose the one that matches it most from the other OS.ĩ. Try to choose a font that looks on your machine - Mac or Windows. External territories such as Hong Kong and Taiwan were less influenced by the mainland government, and retained traditional characters.Ĩ. My understanding here is that in the 50’s, the Chinese government introduced simplified characters to make it easier for people to learn to read. Typically - mainland China uses simplified Chinese, and Hong Kong traditional Chinese. I got some feedback that simplified looks a bit “Comic Sans-y”, but it comes down to the readers which they prefer.ħ. Typically, system fonts work both for traditional and simplified. Cantonese and Mandarin are identical when written.Ħ. Some write in English in WhatsApp, for example, as it’s easier to type on phones.ĥ. However, English is used to some extent by young, modern Chinese. However, once you get onto the mainland, English becomes very hard to find in the mainstream population.Ĥ. There are loads of them expats here, and they have money. In Hong Kong, English is fairly well spoken by certain demographic, in parts of Hong Kong Island. Launching Chinese translations can be huge for your company. This will get you to a decision quickest.ģ. Provide them with one clear preferred choice, and several alternatives. If asking for design feedback, don’t give people lots of options. Fonts that look handwritten are hard to read online, as with Latin-based languages. Look out for serifs/handwritten feeling.To designers, they’re maybe overused, but your users won’t care. We found these to be strongly linked to how Westerners use Helvetica/similar. This was Microsoft YaHei (微软雅黑体) for Windows and Hiragino Sans GB (冬青黑体) for Mac. Having had a look around the internet and asked Chinese-speakers for feedback, there was a clear winner for each font. Some aren’t great, but the right font for 99.5% of websites is in there. They’re tried and tested, and they’re the most used fonts for a reason. System fonts seem to be almost always the answer. You have to choose between Traditional and Simplified Chinese.If you go for a system font, you’ll need to decide on a font each for Windows/Mac.200 glyphs, so the files are huge - the smallest we found was 3mb, which destroys your page load. Even Chinese people can’t necessarily give you great answers - imagine asking a random person on the street to pick your font or critique your design.Nor does anyone else non-Chinese (i.e.I have no idea what font or design looks good in Chinese.So -here’s I’ve highlight the difficulties we faced, our solution, and some learnings. It took several weeks to get everything working properly, and those are weeks I’d love to help others save. A few months ago, we launched the Deliveroo website and app in Chinese. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |