East Asian typography
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East Asian typography is the application of typography to the writing systems of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese languages. Scripts used in East Asian typography include Chinese characters (known as kanji in Japanese, hanja in Korean, and chữ Nôm in Vietnamese), hiragana, katakana, hangul, and the Latin script.
History
Typography with movable type was invented during the eleventh-century Song dynasty in China by Bi Sheng (990–1051).[1] His movable type system was manufactured from ceramic materials, and clay type printing continued to be practiced in China until the Qing dynasty.
Wang Zhen was one of the pioneers of wooden movable type. Although the wooden type was more durable under the mechanical rigors of handling, repeated printing wore the character faces down and the types could be replaced only by carving new pieces.[2]
Metal movable type was first invented in Korea during the Goryeo dynasty, approximately 1230. Hua Sui introduced bronze type printing to China in 1490 AD. The diffusion of both movable-type systems was limited and the technology did not spread beyond East and Central Asia, however.[3]
Before the 19th century, woodblock printing was favored over movable type to print East Asian text, because movable type required reusable types for thousands of Chinese characters. However, the emergence of newspapers in the 19th century made it a worthwhile investment. The first type foundry in Japan, Tsukiji Type Foundry, was established in 1873 by Motogi Shōzō.[4]
Starting in the 1960s, the People's Republic of China's Shanghai Printing Technology and Research Institute (SPTRI) developed new typefaces for Simplified Chinese in the four main Chinese type families: imitation Song, gothic, Ming, and regular script. Of these type families, the communist government favored gothic typefaces because they were plain and "represented a break with the past." The SPTRI was subsequently privatized in the 1990s.[5][better source needed]
Type families
Ming typefaces
Ming or Song (known as Mincho in Japanese) is a style of typeface characterized by contrasting vertical and horizontal strokes with a small triangle nestled into the stroke. These are called uroko (鱗, literally "fish scales") and are analogous to serifs in Latin typefaces.
Gothic typefaces
Gothic typefaces are the equivalent of sans-serif fonts in East Asian scripts. They can be further divided into two main types: round sans fonts have rounded ends, while square sans fonts have square ends.[6]
Imitation Song
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Regular script
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Typographic conventions
Typographic symbols
Japanese has a set of characteristic punctuation marks, see List of Japanese typographic symbols.[7]
Instead of underlines or cursive, Chinese, Japanese and Korean use emphasis marks.
Ruby text
Ruby characters are small, annotative glosses that are usually placed above or to the right of Chinese logograms to show their pronunciation.
See also
- CJK characters
- List of CJK fonts
- History of printing in East Asia
- Arabic typography
- Cyrillic script § Letterforms and typography
- Thai typography
References
- ^ Needham, Joseph (1994). The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 4. Cambridge University Press. p. 14. ISBN 978-0-521-32995-8.
Bi Sheng... who first devised, about 1045, the art of printing with movable type
- ^ Tsien, Tsuen-Hsuin (1985). Paper and Printing. Needham, Joseph Science and Civilization in China:. Vol. 5 part 1. Cambridge University Press. pp. 201–217. ISBN 978-0-521-08690-5.
- ^ Ch'on 1993, p. 19.
- ^ Rigaud, Émilie (2022-03-02). "Japanese Typography: Wood to Metal to Light to Vectors". Pangram Pangram Foundry. Retrieved 2022-08-29.
- ^ Ng, Brian (6 September 2021). "Revolutionary type: Meet the designer decolonizing Chinese fonts". Rest of World. Retrieved 17 September 2022.
- ^ "Understanding Japanese Typography". Humble Bunny. 2011-08-22. Retrieved 2022-08-29.
- ^ "日本語資源 - Nihongoresources.com". www.nihongoresources.com. Retrieved 2022-08-29.
General sources
- Ch'on, Hye-bong (1993), "Typography in Korea", Koreana, 7 (2): 10–19.
External links
- Chinese Type Archive, an open database of Chinese typographical concepts and typefaces
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