Traditional Chinese is most popular in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and most overseas Chinese communities. BIG 5, whose name refers to the five companies that collaborated in its development, has become the standard character set standard for Traditional Chinese in Taiwan.

Although neither GB nor Big-5 encodings have an official connection with a specific character set, they have become synonymous with simplified and traditional sets, respectively.

The Hong Kong Supplemental Character Set, or HKSCS, is a supplementary character set that includes 4941 Chinese characters used in Hong Kong but are not contained in the Big-5 standard character set. There are two code allocation schemes for the HKSCS, one for Big-5 and the other for ISO 10646/Unicode. Ascender also provides support for the HKSCS in both encodings.

Styles

Ascender provides two main type styles for Traditional Chinese fonts which are similar to serif and sans serif style for Latin fonts. Mincho is a Japanese font style that has small serifs at the end of strokes and is used extensively for book and newspaper publishing The Mincho style would be similar to Times New Roman. This same style is called Sung for Chinese fonts. Traditional Chinese fonts that are in the Gothic style feature plain strokes with little or no serifs, similar to the Arial typeface. Gothic Traditional Chinese font styles work well for on-screen legibility.

Unicode

Ascender has extensive experience providing Traditional Chinese fonts in variety of formats and encodings. The most common encoding that developers utilize for Traditional Chinese fonts and other CJK fonts is Unicode. Unicode is an encoding standard which includes many characters, including Unified Han Ideographs and others essential for writing Asian languages. Although Unicode has been the preferred method for CJK and Traditional Chinese font encoding, Ascender has also delivered font data in other encodings, including Microsoft’s Shift JIS.

Please contact us to discuss with us your needs for Traditional Chinese fonts.