Designing for Overseas Chinese Readers: Some Guidelines

Designing for Overseas Chinese Readers: Some Guidelines

1. Introduction
2. Font Size, Typeface and Characters per Line
3. HTML Coding: Charset Code
4. HTML Coding: Page Titles
5. Display of Different Character Sets: Solution One
6. Display of Different Character Sets: Solution Two
7. Summary
8. References

Adaptive Web Sites: An Introduction

Designing Effective Online Press Rooms

TradeOff Cube: A Graphical User Interface Device

By Li Cao
Page 2 of 8

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Font Size, Typeface and Characters per Line

For Simplified Chinese, most web sites use a layout that accommodates 30 to 40 Chinese characters per line. The most popular font size for body text is 3 points (Chinese). However, characters written in Traditional Chinese usually have more strokes than their Simplified Chinese counterparts. Accordingly, proper adjustment should be made for web pages in Traditional Chinese. About 20 to 30 characters per line is suggested and font sizes of 3 or 4 Chinese points are commonly used. [3]

Solid usability studies concerning typefaces are rare. A recent study [1] compared the legibility threshold of characters in three Traditional Chinese typefaces, Song, Kai and Li, on a Visual Display Terminal. The researchers found that the order of legibility was Song, Kai and Li, with Song significantly more legible than Li.

This result coincides with the dominant use of the Song typeface on Chinese language webpages. For the time being, when there is no comprehensive usability study of different typefaces on webpages, it appears a wise choice to stay with Song as the main typeface.

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