CJK Fonts: Frequently Asked Questions
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What does 'CJK' mean?
CJK is an acronym standing for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
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Why group Chinese, Japanese, and Korean together?
Although the terms Chinese, Japanese, and Korean represent distinct languages, traditions, and cultures, their writing systems all share common features of Chinese script.
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What kind of writing is used in Taiwan?
Traditional Chinese writing.
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What kind of writing is used in Japan?
Modern Japanese writing consists of a mix of four scripts: kanji, hiragana, katakana, and romaji.
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What kind of writing is used in China?
Simplified Chinese writing.
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What kind of writing is used in Hong Kong?
Traditional Chinese script is typically used in Hong Kong.
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What kind of writing is used in Korea?
Korean is written in a mix of two scripts; the first is a syllabary called Hangul, while the second consists of Chinese characters called Hanja.
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What do the Japanese call Chinese characters?
Kanji.
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What do the Chinese call Chinese characters?
Hanzi (in Mandarin Chinese)
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What do the Koreans call Chinese characters?
Hanja.
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What are Han characters?
Chinese characters.
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What's an ideographic character?
In the context of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, an ideographic character is a non-alphabetic symbol conforming to the principles of the Chinese writing system.
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What is Unified Han?
Unified Han refers to a set of 20,000 Chinese characters in the Unicode Standard which are shared by Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing.
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Who uses Simplified Chinese writing?
Simplified Chinese writing is used in People's Republic of China and in Singapore.
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Who uses Traditional Chinese writing?
Traditional Chinese writing is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, as well as most of the emigrant Chinese communities around the world.
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Why do Taiwan and People's Republic of China use different types of Chinese writing?
After the 1948 Revolution in People's Republic of China, the government decided to introduce some simplifications to Chinese writing, resulting in the new style called Simplified Chinese. For traditional and political reasons, Taiwan remained with Traditional style.
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Why can't we use the same font for China, Japan, and Korea?
While many characters are shared among the different countries that use Chinese script, the characters often differ stylistically.
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Why are they called Chinese characters even when they're used in Japan?
In this context, 'Chinese characters' generically refers to where they were originally invented rather than where they are used nowadays.
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Are there kanji characters in Japan that Chinese readers would not recognize?
Over the years, many new kanji (Chinese) characters have been developed in Japan. While some can be deciphered by non-Japanese, they still may not be familiar symbols outside of Japan.
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What are gaiji characters?
In general, the term is used for any symbols not supported by a particular Japanese character set. However, most often the term is used in reference to needed kanji characters that are missing from a particular font.
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What is GBK?
GBK is a character-set standard of the People’s Republic of China which includes the entire range of Unified CJK defined in Unicode. GBK supports around 21,000 characters.
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What is Big 5?
Big 5 is a de facto, Taiwanese character set often used for Traditional Chinese. It supports around 13,500 characters.
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What is Shift JIS?
Shift JIS is the common name for a Japanese character-set standard (JIS X 0208 which supports around 7000 characters. Often Shift JIS can also refer to the particular character order (encoding) defined in JIS X 0208.
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What are CID fonts?
CID fonts are Postscript-based fonts which can support a large number (65,536 max) of characters. The format is often used for CJK fonts. CID format makes it possible to change the character order (encoding) of a font through the use of character-to-glyph tables (CMaps) which are external to the font.
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What's the difference between Hiragana and Katakana?
Hiragana and Katakana are parallel syllabic alphabets used in writing Japanese. Hiragana is most commonly used for the variable grammatical elements in Japanese sentences, as well as for words which have no kanji symbols. On the other hand, Katakana is mostly used for foreign words and names.
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What is a radical?
The radical is the smallest, meaningful element out of which a Chinese (ideographic) character is built. By combining existing radicals in varying configurations, new ideographic characters can be created.
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Why are CJK fonts so large?
A font which supports West European languages typically contains about 225 characters; one which also supports Cyrillic and Greek, as well as sundry symbols, contains about 650 characters. On the other hand, consider that a typical Japanese font contains at least 7000 characters some of which are made up of a large number of strokes. Is it any wonder that a CJK font file will be many times larger than a typical Latin font?
(See the charts section for more information on the number of characters in common CJK fonts.)
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