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We take it for granted now that typesetting Chinese and other languages is a straightforward matter using computers and readily available software. But as recently as twenty years ago typesetting was a physical process. The Chinese are credited with inventing movable type centuries before Gutenberg started his press in Germany in 1439, but how did the Chinese deal with the many thousands of characters necessary for typesetting Chinese books?

With only 26 letters in the Latin alphabet, plus numbers and punctuation, a little over 100 types were necessary to typeset European languages, which makes setting up a system for typesetting these languages relatively easy. These were organised in type cases which were divided into compartments in which the type was stored in alphabetical order.

The Chinese language is not alphabetic but uses logograms, or characters, which represent words and morphemes (word particles). Around 3,000 characters need to be recognised to read a newspaper and educated Chinese will know around double that number. This may already seems like a large number, but there are up to 30, 000 characters required to take into account the occasional use of rare words. With such a complex system how did early Chinese printers organise their type?

Moveable type in China was made in different ways from the cheap and most fragile made of clay and glue to the more durable, but much more expensive, types made from copper. Wooden type was also used from the 14th century. One of the common methods of organising this vast number of different types was to place them on two circular bamboo tables which could rotate. One table was used for the common types and the other for the rarer characters. Each table was divided into eight sections, and in each section types were arranged in their numerical order according to their listing in the “Book of Rhymes”, which was an early attempt to organise Chinese characters based on their sound. In this book a number was allocated to each character. A proof of the Chinese document to be typeset was marked with these numbers before the type was selected and placed in the composition frame.

If a character could not be found it was possible to create one on the spot if the printer was using wood or clay types. The Book of Rhymes was eventually replaced around 1700 by the Imperial K’ang Hsi Dictionary which organised characters by radicals, the sub-parts of a character which classify it. For example, the radical for “water” would appear as the radical in words such as “river” and “sweat”. This is system is still used today.

The next time we start to complain about the complexities of typesetting Chinese here in the Adelphi Studio we should be thankful for the fact that we are not hacking out new characters from a block of wood with a chisel!

Steve is the media manager for Adelphi Translations Ltd, in Yorkshire England, with an interest the history of languages, printing and New Media. Adelphi Translations is a multi-language agency producing typeset documents in over 100 languages as well as foreign language voice-recording and subtitling and web site translation.

Article Source: A Short History of Chinese Typesetting