Typesetting Tips

Asian Languages

There are 2 dialects of Chinese – Traditional and Simplified. Traditional Chinese is mainly used in Hong Kong and
Taiwan and Simplified is used in Mainland China. There are differences of characters, punctuation, expressions and
internal coding. Due to its lighter grammar structure, Chinese usually requires less space than its English equivalent,
so you will not have to worry about needing extra space when designing your layout to accommodate Chinese.

Japanese however has a very strict grammar structure, so when translated from English, it appears more ‘wordy’ and expanded and thus requires more layout space.

Arabic

Languages such as Arabic and Hebrew also have to be treated like the Asian languages in their formatting. But beware Arabic is a right to left reading language. When designing your layout you should make sure that it readily adapts to accommodate reverse reading – which also means publications will open left to right!

Non-Unicode Fonts – Thai, Turkish, Greek & Hindi

Non-Unicode fonts are not available on Word/Office 2000, and are only available on specialized software packages. However, CTC has a large selection of non-Unicode fonts available, and can cater to all of your typesetting needs if you are considering these sorts of languages.

Thai line breaking is quite different to that of English, so be warned – the final layout may appear quite different to the English source!

Cyrillic Fonts

Cyrillic languages include Russian, Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Macedonian – all of which require their own
individual fonts.

Click here for more translation tips on the most common languages.