Typography

Member lesson

CJK type

Lesson 28 of 34 in Typography.

Meet the Open-Source Typeface Source Han Serif | Adobe Creative Cloud · Adobe Creative Cloud
Lesson

CJK typefaces are a different order of undertaking. A usable Chinese font needs several thousand characters and a comprehensive one runs into tens of thousands, against roughly two hundred glyphs for a basic Latin face. A single family can take years.

latinbaseline sitsunderdevanagarihangs from theshirorekhaarabicruns along thebaseline, right tolefta shared baseline is a Latin assumption
Latin, Devanagari and Arabic aligned to different reference lines.
A designer on a ladder before a huge wall of small square drawers, with a tiny tray of pieces on a table beside it.
A designer climbs a wall of thousands of square drawers while a tiny tray beside it holds a basic Latin set. A Chinese font needs thousands of characters, each drawn to fill a square.
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  1. Question 1, locked

    Which of these words means this? “Chinese, Japanese and Korean, grouped because they share Han characters.”

    • CJK
    • Hot metal
    • Punchcutter
    • Incunabula
  2. Question 2, locked

    Which of these words means this? “A logographic character. Thousands are needed for ordinary text.”

    • Axis
    • Ratio
    • Han character
    • Modular scale
  3. Question 3, locked

    Which of these words means this? “CJK characters are designed to fill a square. Spacing works differently as a result.”

    • Tracking
    • Kerning
    • Lineal
    • Em square

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