![]() ![]() This approach, early advocates argued, would enable Chinese computers to achieve what their Western counterparts already enjoyed: access to one’s entire language, not just a small portion thereof. In vector fonts 1, Chinese characters are digitally rendered, not with a grid of pixels, but with a series of straight-line segments, creating something like orthographic “stick figures.” Rather than storing static pixel data in memory, these skeletal characters are stored as a set of mathematical, x-y coordinates, which the computer then connects dynamically using its native graphics processing capacities. In the early years of Chinese computing, an entirely different approach to Chinese fonts emerged that involved bypassing bitmaps altogether: vector fonts, known in Chinese as shiliang Hanzi (矢量汉字).Įmpty vector grid for creating skeleton characters. Not only that, but they did not accept the premise of the “bitmap equation” I sketched out above-where one takes the oversized Chinese bitmap grid and then multiplies it by the number of Chinese characters. Not everyone accepted this sacrifice, however. ![]() Courtesy of Louis Rosenblum Papers, Stanford University Special Collections.Ĭonfronted with this problem, most computer manufacturers and software developers settled on a compromise solution: to include only a limited number of Chinese characters in memory, with priority given to what are often referred to as “common usage characters.” Containing anywhere from a few thousand characters, to perhaps as many as ten thousand, this solution basically gave up on the idea of creating a font containing the entire Chinese lexicon. Draft bitmap of Chinese characters from the Sinotype III Chinese font, sketched out prior to digitization. ![]()
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