Quite often, websites developed in Singapore need to be localized (translated) into other Asian languages. Here’s my experience of working on Asian fonts. This is more useful for Flash designer and developers. But since embedding fonts for HTML is becoming a norm, this may be helpful for HTML work, too.
- Most fonts only have English glyphs (characters) and some symbols (punctuations and copyright mark etc.)
- Only well established fonts have other latin glyphs (circles and funny heads on top of the letters)
- None of the popular fonts (Helvetica or Futura) has Chinese, Thai, Japanese or Korean glyphs
- Big Brands’ special fonts (Nokia or Cisco) do not support Asian languages
- The only one font has all characters (full unicode set) is Arial Unicode MS
- The default local fonts are generally very ugly. Get help from someone who speaks the language to search for a good looking font.
- If you embed a font with the full character set the file size will be 12 MB (and most of the Asian countries have slow internet speed)
- Thai characters are smaller than other languages’ characters (11px or 10px Thai words are not readable)
- Vietnamese characters is a mix of all kinds of latin languages (details here)
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