Typesetting East Asian languages on the web
summary
Explains how to balance web font design and performance using practical tools and numbers: prefer WOFF2 for compression, use @font-face with Unicode-range to load fallbacks, and expect CJK fonts to cover >30,000 glyphs (minimum ~7,000 glyphs for simplified, ~13,000 for traditional). Shows Firefox devtools font panel and font highlighter, demonstrates variable fonts for size/performance gains, and applies writing-mode and text-orientation for vertical layout. Notes text-combine-upright is supported only partially and that flexbox+vertical had cross‑browser bugs that were fixed after reporting.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (16)
- 0:00Start
- 3:30Han Characters
- 9:18What Is Exactly a Font in the World of Metal Typesetting
- 9:45What Is a Glyph
- 10:22The Earliest Fonts
- 12:39Composite Fonts
- 13:25Font Panel
- 14:49Font Synthesis
- 16:58Variable Font
- 18:01The Writing Mode
- 19:17Text Combined Upright
- 20:00Languages That Use East Asian Text
- 21:41Rotated Latin Text
- 23:02Vertical Layouts
- 25:52Browser Release Cycles
- 27:13Inspiration for Vertical Layouts
