Five-pixel height is all you need to deliver the entire English alphabet, but what size canvas is needed, and how many pixels are required to construct a Chinese character, called a Hanzi? The strokes in each Hanzi vary in number, direction, width, contrast, and style. At the first sight, it seems impossible to fit Hanzi into highly restricted grids of pixels. Since the 1980s, Chinese information scientists and type designers have strived to bring the ancient script into the digital era. In this talk, Willie Liu will look at his efforts and experiments; walking through the Chinese bitmap typefaces used from the national standard, down to the smallest bitmap Chinese we’ve had in computer games. We will also present our own explorations in the low-resolution world of dinkie bitmap.
Bitmapping Chinese
