Making Chinese typefaces! With components!!??!!
summary
Claims that component-based interpolation cuts creation time for an 8,000 character font into something practical, and demonstrates a working pipeline: define primitives (a straight line), interpolate variants, compose radicals into glyphs, and export fonts. Concrete numbers: simplified ≈7,000 glyphs, traditional ≈13,000, full set ≈50,000, newsletter ≈20,000. Tooling examples include the Black Foundry extension for components and yosa cool style glyph subsetting for smaller bundles. Historical constraint: 16×16 grids once meant ~256 KB for 8,000 chars.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:01Chinese movable type history
- 4:47Rendering Chinese on computers
- 6:57Chinese type styles
- 8:45Component-based font design
- 10:07Font optimization techniques
- 11:10Bilingual typography examples
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