Previous editions of the HKSCS were compatible with Big Five, but the 2016 standard is Unicode-only and diverges by replacing 22 Big Five characters with variant forms from Unicode. Note: Formerly part of the TC ("Traditional Chinese") locale, the HK locale became necessary with HKSCS-2016. They can also use the Unicode technology of glyph variants (supported in OS X 10.6 and above) to provide localized glyphs for users in China/Singapore (the "SC" locale), Hong Kong (the "HK" locale), and Taiwan (the "TC" locale). TTC extension contain multiple fonts, usually different weights of the same font. OTF extension, and those that use TrueType names and outlines and carry the. There are two kinds of OpenType fonts: those that use PostScript Type 1 names and outlines and carry the. OpenType is an open standard developed by Microsoft and Adobe in 1996 to absorb the underlying differences between the TrueType and PostScript formats.
Most Windows 98 and later fonts have them, while most Windows 95 and earlier fonts do not.
With Mac OS X 10.5 (2007), Apple introduced full support for Windows TrueType font files, but the files must contain Unicode cmap tables. Regardless, all TrueType fonts contain "cmap" tables that map its glyphs to various encodings. Font files had to be converted between Windows and Macintosh. In 1991, Microsoft adopted Apple's TrueType font format, but they used a different approach to storing the font data. OS X provides full support for all types of PostScript-based fonts. CID stands for "Character Identifier," which refers to the numbers that are used to index and access the characters in the font. Chinese Postscript fonts use the CID format, which uses Type 1 character descriptions tailored especially for East Asian writing systems. The most common PostScript font format is Type 1. It supports both graphics and text, with built-in support for fonts. If you want to learn more about font formats and printing technologies, Ken Lunde's CJKV Information Processing is very thorough on these topics.ĭeveloped by Adobe, PostScript is a "page-description" language for printers. The information provided here is limited to what the typical Chinese Mac user might want to know. They are fully scalable: to print or display a character, the outline is scaled to the desired size, then rendered by filling the outline with bits or pixels.
Outline fonts are fonts in which glyphs are described mathematically as "outlines," a series of line segments, arcs, and curves. The characters defined by the encodings inside your computer are abstract, whereas the glyphs defined by a font are concrete visual forms that can be rendered on screen or paper. They are still frequently used in calligraphy as well as for inscriptions and religious text.Fonts begin where character sets end. Currently, Simplified Chinese is the official system in the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, and is in common use among some ethnic Chinese communities. Although simplified characters are taught and endorsed by the government of China, there is no prohibition against the use of traditional characters. Simplified Chinese was developed in an effort to improve literacy in the People’s Republic of China, by reducing the number of strokes per character and eliminating variants deemed superfluous. They became mostly standardized between the 3 rd and 7 th centuries CE, and continued largely unchanged for many centuries. Characters with this form are now called Traditional Chinese, whereas a reformed system developed in the mid-20 th century in China is known as Simplified Chinese. The characters evolved from earlier systems which originally used small abstracted images to represent meaning, and then became less detailed over time. The different varieties of Chinese are all written using Chinese characters.Ĭhinese writing uses a logographic system consisting of thousands of characters, where each one represents a small number of meanings and a monosyllabic sound. There are many varieties of Chinese, typically described as “dialects”, though the varieties are often not mutually intelligible. Chinese (simplified Chinese: 汉语 traditional Chinese: 漢語) is spoken by about 1.3 billion people mainly in the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Singapore and other parts of Southeast Asia.