I once heard that when handwriting a chinese character, even changing the thickness of a line in it changes the entire meaning of it. So my question is, do the chinese have different fonts? I mean. we have a font where every alphabet letter is a face puking out the shape of said letter... hard to imagine that working in another language. And this brings up the bigger question, should English speaking people be PROUD, or embarrassed that we can have people puking out our written language. Also, a gold star to anyone who has made a sign using one of these weird fonts and can submit a pic as proof!
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chinese fonts?
- Thread starter annasbrew
- Start date
geb
New Member
I posted your question on a website forum I found in the web links that works with Chinese characters, dynalab.com., and this is the reply I received,
Hi George,
It is not true that changing the thickness of a line in a Chinese character will change the whole meaning of the character. In English, there are only 26 letters. In Chinese, you might have more than 20,000 characters. As a result, a foreigner might feel that many Chinese characters have the same looking except the thickness of some lines. Actually, there might be more than 100 type faces (fonts) of Chinese characters from a single font vendor. You could have a look on this sample page http://www.dynalab.com/DesktopDefault.aspx?TabId=3548&Lang=en-US which is showing the same sentence using various Chinese fonts. You could also see some more samples in the "Dyna Shop" web page http://www.dynalab.com/DesktopDefault.aspx?TabId=3866&Lang=en-US.
Hi George,
It is not true that changing the thickness of a line in a Chinese character will change the whole meaning of the character. In English, there are only 26 letters. In Chinese, you might have more than 20,000 characters. As a result, a foreigner might feel that many Chinese characters have the same looking except the thickness of some lines. Actually, there might be more than 100 type faces (fonts) of Chinese characters from a single font vendor. You could have a look on this sample page http://www.dynalab.com/DesktopDefault.aspx?TabId=3548&Lang=en-US which is showing the same sentence using various Chinese fonts. You could also see some more samples in the "Dyna Shop" web page http://www.dynalab.com/DesktopDefault.aspx?TabId=3866&Lang=en-US.
Janus Signs
New Member
thanks!
geb
New Member
Here's another link that was provided, they have some answers under Chinese FAQ:
http://zhongwen.com/
http://zhongwen.com/