When we deliver a Chinese text, we of course format it neatly so it is easy to read, but when it comes to printed matter, what you need is typesetting and artwork.

This page is intended to be an information package for people ordering typesetting in Chinese, both professionals in the graphic industry and others. Reading the following short introduction should make concepts clearer when we agree on the details of a job.

We can deliver typesetting in several electronic formats independent of hardware platforms or operating systems, such as PDF, EPS, PostScript etc., where the Chinese text is stored as outlines, so our customer need not have the typefaces we use. If necessary, we of course also deliver as hard copy.

As to Chinese typefaces, we could in a way talk about serif and sans serif, almost like in Latin lettering, the various Song family fonts with a little “hump” at the end of a horizontal stroke being “serif” and Hei fonts being “sans serif”. There are also various typefaces that resemble handwriting with a brush, and font makers have developed numerous special fonts for purposes such as advertising. We have collected a selection of font samples to a pdf file.

There are no spaces between words in typeset Chinese, and all characters are as wide, including punctuation, brackets etc. A word consisting of several characters may be divided at any point, so a column in Chinese is naturally justified at both edges. It often happens that a punctuation character drops alone to the beginning of a line, which looks bad. This can be corrected by increasing the character spacing of the previous line, or by re-formulating the language.

Western words among Chinese text, often within parenthesis, may cause trouble, especially when the column is narrow. This kind of trouble can mainly be resolved by re-formulating the language so that the western word is placed naturally. We recommend that customers should not place western words into Chinese typesetting by themselves, but rather instruct us about which kind of a typeface they wish us to use.

A Chinese font of course consists of thousands of characters. The difference between simplified and traditional character sets should be considered when selecting a font. Simplified characters are used in the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, while traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and many other countries with a Chinese-speaking population. The character set should be chosen according to the country or region the printed matter or media production is intended for.

Furthermore, most of the general principles of typography apply to Chinese as well as Western languages; simple is beautiful and too much trickery gives a cheap and amateurish impression.