CHINESE, JAPANESE AND KOREAN FONT SOLUTIONS

Ascender provides all of the major Asian language groups, including Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean, or what is commonly referred to as “CJK” fonts. Ascender’s CJK fonts are optimized for legibility on screen and in print. Ascender has helped many developers implement their international font strategies. In fact, the typographic engineers at Ascender helped produce the Arial Unicode font for Microsoft. The team at Ascender has also assisted Apple, IBM, Oracle, Sun, Sybase and many other top companies with their multilingual font needs.

A brief background of CJK terminology is listed below along with information on how Ascender delivers CJK fonts to its customers:

Simplified Chinese

Simplified Chinese generally refers to the Chinese characters officially simplified by the People's Republic of China government in an attempt to promote literacy. Mainland China and Singapore are the regions that typically use simplified Chinese characters.

A common codepage that is utilized by developers implementing Chinese fonts in their products is GB 2312-80, which consists of over 6000 frequently used Chinese ideographs used in mainland China. There is also the extension of GB 2312-80 called GBK which is encoded with 20,902 unified ideographs that are assigned in Unicode 2.1. GB 18030 was created as an update to GB 2312-80 for Unicode 3.0. Ascender’s Chinese fonts comply with the Chinese standards bodies and can be provided in a variety of code pages.

Click here to see a list of Simplified Chinese fonts available for download or licensing.

Traditional Chinese

Traditional Chinese is most popular in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and most overseas Chinese communities. BIG 5, whose name refers to the five companies that collaborated in its development, has become the standard character set standard for Traditional Chinese in Taiwan.

Although neither GB nor Big-5 encodings have an official connection with a specific character set, they have become synonymous with simplified and traditional sets, respectively.

The Hong Kong Supplemental Character Set, or HKSCS, is a supplementary character set that includes 4941 Chinese characters used in Hong Kong but are not contained in the Big-5 standard character set. There are two code allocation schemes for the HKSCS, one for Big-5 and the other for ISO 10646/Unicode. Ascender also provides support for the HKSCS in both encodings.

Click here to see a list of Traditional Chinese fonts available for download or licensing.

Japanese

Ascender also provides Japanese (Kanji) fonts which have many different character sets and encodings. Kanji is a Japanese writing system based on modified Chinese characters. Kanji fonts generally support the four major writing systems used in Japan: Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji, and Romaji. The Shift JIS encoding is Microsoft’s encoding for a Japanese character set containing approximately 7000 characters. Many software and hardware developers ask to match the Microsoft Character set when shipping Japanese fonts.

Ascender is also proud to offer IBM's Heisei fonts for license to software and hardware developers. The three Heisei fonts are an industry standard in Japan and recognized for their typographic quality.

Click here to see a list of Japanese fonts available for download or licensing.

Korean

Korean makes use of two writing systems known as Hangul and Hanja. Hangul is the syllabic writing system used in Korea. Hanja refers to the Chinese ideograph characters used in the typical Korean font. Ascender’s Korean fonts support Hangul and Hanja characters. The primary character set support is the KSC 5601 standard. This character set includes 17,100 characters.

Click here to see a list of Korean fonts available for download or licensing.

Styles
Ascender provides two main type styles for Asian fonts which are similar to serif and sans serif style for Latin fonts. Mincho is a Japanese font style that has small serifs at the end of strokes and is used extensively for book and newspaper publishing The Mincho style would be similar to Times New Roman. This same style is called Sung for Chinese fonts. CJK fonts that are in the Gothic style feature plain strokes with little or no serifs, similar to the Arial typeface. Gothic CJK styles work well for on-screen legibility.

Unicode
Ascender has extensive experience providing Asian fonts in variety of formats and encodings. The most common encoding that developers utilize for CJK fonts is Unicode. Unicode is an encoding standard which includes many characters, including Unified Han Ideographs and others essential for writing Asian languages. Although Unicode has been the preferred method for CJK font encoding, Ascender has also delivered font data in other encodings, including Microsoft’s Shift JIS.

Please contact us to discuss with us your needs for a custom multilingual font solution.

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