Hanyi Type

The quality of Hanyi fonts are the best in the market. The process of font making is a very time consuming and laborious one. They opt for the best and most challenging route in creating their fonts. Notably, they own large volumes of the original large size Chinese brush writings from famous scholars. Most of those scholars have already passed away. For each font, there were writings of 30,000 -50,000 Chinese characters. Each character may be written many times until the scholar is completely satisfied knowing that these characters will be used in computers by the millions or probably billions of generations to come. Each character is normally written on an 18x18 inch paper.

Currently, computer technologies and standards can only utilize a small portion of Chinese characters, although a very useful portion. Chinese internal code standard (GB code) for computing defines 6763 simplified characters. Taiwan's Big5 code defines 13000 traditional characters. The most advanced standard, Unicode, defines 20000 Chinese characters. There are still many changes ahead in the Chinese font industry.

The Hanyi Type fonts combined with TwinBridge Chinese Partner are in the TrueType font format, suitable for office and professional use. Its maximum output quality is limited to 600 dpi (dot per inch). The quality of the printout can not be further improved no matter how nice the subsequent output process equipment, similar to the photography process.

In addition to the Hanyi Type OA, Hanyi also has Postscript and Professional version of Hanyi Type for Macintosh. The quality of these fonts are 600-1200 dpi and 1200 and up dpi respectively. For normal use, users are generally satisfied with 600 dpi output. However, for professional printing, higher quality is important.

The Product

This joint product combines the TwinBridge Chinese Partner 4.0 with 46 Hanyi Type OA fonts. It is aimed at two groups of users:

• Office or individual who requires good quality Chinese output in PC Windows environment.

Customers can utilize all the power of the Chinese Partner and obtain a high quality output via regular printer. The document can also be prepared for proof or film output by a prepress output center.

• Company, office or individual who requires superior Chinese output quality for their document or graphic design.

The output created from this product in Windows can be routed to Macintosh for high end printing or film output. There are two ways to achieve it:

Blind processing:

A print file is made in PC in a format recognizable by Mac. The file is then printed in Mac environment. The disadvantage of this approach is:

1. The output quality is limited by whatever quality available on the PC. No more enhancement is possible.
2. There can be no changes made to the document on the Mac. If changes are desired, the process needs to be repeated from the PC.

This approach can be very limiting. It is usually wasteful in time and money while suffering in quality. This has been a major bottleneck and inconvenience in Chinese printing solutions.

PC-Mac Bridge:

This is only accomplished by a set of application combinations and of which this product provides a vital part.

1. Chinese platform is required in both PC and Mac. On the Mac, there is a Chinese tool kit made by Apple and on the PC, Chinese Partner provides the environment. In addition, both environments also need to match in Chinese internal code standards, that is GB or Big5. In this product, the Hanyi fonts are Big5 coded so both platforms must be able to handle Big5 fonts.
2. Chinese Document modification on the Mac is not always required but the capability is preferred. In order to modify, there must be Mac application(s) that can accept PC file. This is a rarity. So far only Adobe's Pagemaker is capable of doing so. There is a PC Chinese Pagemaker GB version and a Big5 version. There is also a Mac Chinese Pagemaker that can handle both GB and Big5 codes.
3. Chinese font used in PC must be recognized in the Mac so that the layout can be consistent. Hanyi offers 46 fonts in both platforms. This way each font used in PC can be matched in Mac and there will be no distortions to the PC document. Any Mac outfit equipped with Hanyi high end fonts can now service PC customer with ease.

Chinese Software Digest

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