In an outtake from a series of interviews he did with Lynn La, he talked about designing smartphone fonts: On a phone, there's always a trade-off of space in terms of memory and how much pizzazz want to put into it. Google worked with Monotype type designer Steve Matteson on the now-ubiquitous Droid Sans. According to Adobe, Asian fonts costs as much as 10 times as much as Latin fonts because of their complexity.Īnd finally, it has to be small. That's prohibitively expensive for all but the biggest companies. And while there's a modern pan-CJK font, URW++ Nimbus Sans Global (in light, regular, medium, bold, and monospace) and Nimbus Roman Global (regular and bold), each of those options I just listed has to be purchased separately, and each costs $2,653 (or €2,320 including VAT). This isn't the first pan-CJK font - that was Bitstream Cyberbit in 1998. Korean Hangul is the most simple of the pack, with a 24-symbol alphabet. Japanese Kanji, based off Chinese from as far back as the 6th century, also has tens of thousands of characters, though once again, a typical reader knows between about 2,000 - 3,000. But it has two types, Simplified and Traditional, and several regional dialects that require variations on a lot of characters. Chinese alone has tens of thousands of characters - no one is quite sure how many, though the consensus seems to be that 'only' about 2,000 - 3,500 are regularly used. Not so for the so-called CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) fonts.

That gives us a lot more latitude when digitizing, with the ability to add design touches such as ligatures and old-style numerals, as well as multiple variants (like regular, light, condensed and extended) and weights (like bold and italic). Even adding diacritical marks, like those used by French, Spanish, and German, don't add much to the language's full character set. Because our languages are alphabet- rather than ideogram- or syllable-based, the set of components required to write them is relatively small. We westerners, with our Latin-based fonts, don't appreciate how easy we have it. 28 language-specific OTFs at approximately 5MB each: 7 each of Japanese OTFs, Korean OTFs, Chinese Traditional OTFs, and Chinese Simplified OTFs.7 Multilingual OTCs ( OpenType Collections)in 7 weights, approximately 19MB each, with support for all languages: J,K, CS, CT, and Latin.7 Multilingual OTFs (Opentype files) in 7 weights, approximately 18MB each, with support for all languages: J, K, CS (Simplified Chinese), CT (Traditional Chinese), and Latin.

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