Re:The long process of creating a Chinese font
by Nitramp on Saturday December 19, 2015 @10:46AM
(#10763841)
Experienced readers of alphabetic languages recognise words by pattern matching their shape. That is, you do not individually decipher the characters that make up a word, but you pattern match on (mostly) the ascenders and descenders, and then maybe sanity check first and last characters.
That greatly speeds up reading, but also makes it hard to discover typos, in particular characters inside of words that have no as-/descenders.
In this way, alphabetic writing is maybe more accessible - novice readers can decipher character by character and map to phonemes, thus having a way to understand all words; experts pattern match and read faster.
Re:The long process of creating a Chinese font
by azernik on Saturday December 19, 2015 @11:14PM
(#10766032)
And the tradeoff is that it's not quite as well optimized for the pattern-matching fast path. The systems just have very different performance/usability characteristics.
That greatly speeds up reading, but also makes it hard to discover typos, in particular characters inside of words that have no as-/descenders.
In this way, alphabetic writing is maybe more accessible - novice readers can decipher character by character and map to phonemes, thus having a way to understand all words; experts pattern match and read faster.