Re: Chinese font families

On 10/22/2014 01:20 PM, Phillips, Addison wrote:
> Hi Richard,
>
> Thanks for pulling this page together.

Page = https://www.w3.org/International/wiki/Chinese_font_families
I presume. :)

> For the first problem, conventions exist, of course, in existing implementation.
> For example, Song (and related or similar faces, such as Sung and Ming) is
> usually serif while Hei (et al) is sans-serif. In Japanese, 'serif' generally
> means a 'mincho' font, while 'sans-serif' means a 'gothic' font. 'cursive'
> usually is applied to faces such as Kai that have a more "hand-drawn" or
> "brushed" style, but can run to even more calligraphic styles ("grass" fonts
> similar to Cao, for example). But what should "fantasy" mean? How should
> "monospace" be handled?

'fantasy' in non-Latin fonts is probably as broad and crazy and more-or-less
useless a general category as it is for Latin. I think it's basically "things
which didn't fit elsewhere"... Here are some examples for Chinese:
   http://chinesefont.brushes8.com/diamond-sweetheart-mobile-phone-font-simplified-chinese-traditional-chinese.html
   http://chinesefont.brushes8.com/classic-decorative-pattern-airflow-font-traditional-chinese.html
   http://chinesefont.brushes8.com/japan-san-ci-yuan-font-simplified-chinese.html

Monospace is pretty straightforward: it would be a font in which all characters
are the same width. They can be serif, sans-serif, cursive, or whatever, but
they have to have a consistent advance width. For many East Asian fonts, all
letters belonging to the East Asian scripts are the same width, however
punctuation, Latin, and digits are often proportional. A monospace font will
not have proportional punctuation, Latin, or digits: all characters with an
advance width must have the same advance width. Monospace fonts are typically
used for coding and ASCII art.

> The same questions can be applied to other scripts, such as Indic or Arabic.
> For example, while all Arabic scripts are "cursive", one supposes "cursive"
> doesn't mean Kufi?

I suppose the same. I think Kufi would be categorized however we categorize
blackletter fonts for Latin. I'm not sure how we categorize blackletter fonts
for Latin, though. :) I think it would either be serif or fantasy.

> For the second problem, while it is common to associate fonts like Song
> with the serif style or Gothic with the sans-serif style, this leaves
> some stylistic variations that do not have exact associations out in the
> cold. For example, one site lists these styles for Chinese (I do not vouch
> for the accuracy/completeness):
>
> "sans-serif" - such as Hei; system provided "sans-serif" font on many platforms
> "serif" - such as Ming/Song/Sung, etc.; system provided "serif" font on many platforms
> "regular script" - such as Kai; more calligraphic, second most common print style after Ming/Song
> "semi-cursive" - such as Xing; somewhere in between Kai and Cao
> "grass script" - such as Cao; free-flowing cursive
> "clerical script"  - such as Li; old-fashioned but colorful and still pretty widely used
> "seal script" - used on seals, not widely used for longer text but sometimes used for visual effect

I'm unsure about the last two (I'd probably put clerical script in the same
bucket as blackletter and Kufi), but I think Kai, Xing, and Cao would all
fall under 'cursive'. For Latin, for example, cursive spans from Monotype
Corsiva through the Zaner and Carpenter Script families, i.e. varying
levels of cursiveness.

> So the problem is whether we should provide additional generic names for
> users of these scripts. These generic names, if added, have a specific
> implementation impact: vendors have to support resolving these generic
> names to some font (whether an appropriate typeface is installed or not).
> But not providing these names makes it difficult to style documents in
> these languages even when the exact typeface name isn't required. Thus,
> I tend to favor documenting and adding additional language- or
> script-specific generics, including providing pre-defined mappings to
> the existing generics (e.g. "clerical" -> "serif").

I agree with this. We should try to map to existing generics insofar as
possible. It might still be necessary to provide additional generics in
some cases, but that route should be reserved for cases where a distinction
in typeface styles is used within single documents to represent semantic
distinction, similar to Kai vs. Song in Chinese.

~fantasai

Received on Thursday, 23 October 2014 00:25:18 UTC