Asian Absolute Newsletter, Summer 2006

Designers and marketeers turning their attentions to Asia find that accommodating translated text within artwork is one of the first technical hurdles they face. The following is a brief overview of the process of typesetting Asian languages, and some pointers as to how common problems may be solved.

Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts are complex in comparison with Western character sets. Whereas the roman alphabet and most other modern scripts possess a relatively small number of characters, there are many thousand character options in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. It is for this reason that they are constructed electronically as double-byte characters, as opposed to the single-byte characters which form most other scripts. Many applications can only handle single-byte characters. The complexities and incompatibilities pertaining to Asian scripts are overcome through use of software and processes which differ from those involved in single-byte language typesetting.

Several techniques may be used to produce a piece of Asian language artwork that can be viewed and printed without specialist software. One effective method is to turn text into a graphic format, such as outlined EPS files, which are then positioned in an English file and printed in the usual manner. Alternatively, a hi-res PDF can be created with Asian fonts embedded. With these methods, a company's materials may be shared by its global offices without having to overcome technical disparities.

Some artwork packages, such as recent Adobe creations, do support double-byte characters. Where this is the case, typesetting may be carried out in the English-language version of the software. However, two further obstacles remain. The first is that most Western computers are not set up with professional Asian fonts in multiple weights suitable for typesetting, which are expensive and can be hard to find. The second is that the ability of software to determine where line breaks should occur in Asian languages rarely matches a human carrying out the task of creating the most balanced and aesthetic flow of text manually. This is particularly true of Japanese, whose line breaking rules are very complex.

The latter two points also apply to South East Asian languages such as Thai and Khmer although, as with roman scripts, they comprise a more limited set of characters and thus are single-byte languages. The same line break requirements often remain and, as when typesetting any language, the best way of ensuring quality work is by employing DTP operators with extensive experience of flowing the text of these languages naturally.

For more information on Asian language typesetting, click here.

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chinese translation | japanese translation | korean translation