There are about twenty-eight thousand Chinese characters that need to be designed. The average number of strokes in a Chinese character is 12. In Arphic JingXi Hei, for example, the average number of control points for each stroke is about 100. Therefore, there are about 33,600,000 control points to deal with when developing a Chinese typeface. When creating a Variable Font, the control points of every pole of every axis need to correspond, so it’s a huge work to design, test the transfer to a Variable Font, and fix the design and control points. In this talk Jeff Wu shares the problems he met in developing Chinese Variable Fonts and how he overcame them: 1) The traps that must be avoided when designing strokes. 2) How many axes are proper for Chinese typefaces? 3) When transfering to Variable Fonts, how to set up the parameters of each table. 4) How to avoid different results when setting up the same parameter on different platforms (OS, browser, applications).
The problems that need to be solved when developing Chinese Variable Fonts
