Abstract
This document points to resources for the layout and presentation of text in languages that use the Chinese script. The target audience includes developers of Web standards and technologies, such as HTML, CSS, Mobile Web, Digital Publications, and Unicode, as well as implementers of web browsers, ebook readers, and other applications that need to render Chinese text.
Status of This Document
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document at the time of its publication. A list of current W3C
publications and the latest revision of this technical report can be found
in the W3C technical reports index at
https://www.w3.org/TR/.
This document points to resources for Chinese script layout and text support on the Web and in eBooks. These requirements provide information for Web technologies such as CSS, HTML and digital publications about how to support languages written using the Chinese script. The information here is developed in conjunction with a document that summarises gaps where the Web fails to adequately support the Chinese script.
The editor's draft of this document is being developed in the GitHub repository Chinese Language Enablement (clreq), with contributors from the W3C Internationalization Interest Group. It is published by the Internationalization Working Group. The end target for this document is a Working Group Note.
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Some links on this page point to repositories or pages to which information will be added over time. Initially, the link may produce no results, but as issues, tests, etc. are created they will show up.
Links that have a gray color led to no content the last time this document was updated. They are still live, however, since relevant content could be added at any time. When the document is updated, links that now point to results will have their live colour restored.
This document points to resources for Chinese script layout and text support on the Web and in eBooks. These resources provide information for developers of Web technologies such as CSS, HTML and digital publications, and for application developers, about how to support languages written using the Chinese script. They include requirements, tests, GitHub discussions, type samples, and more,
The document focuses on typographic layout issues. For a deeper understanding of the Chinese script and how it works see Chinese (Han) Orthography Notes, which includes topics such as:
Phonology, and
Characters.
This document should be used alongside a separate document, Chinese Gap Analysis, which describes gaps in language support for users of the Chinese script, and prioritises and describes the impact of those gaps on the user.
Gap reports are brought to the attention of spec and browser implementers, and are tracked via the Gap Analysis Pipeline. (Filter for Chinese script items)
The document Language enablement index points to this document and others, and provides a central location for developers and implementers to find information related to various scripts.
The W3C also has a repository with discussion threads related to the Chinese script, including requests from developers to the user community for information about how scripts/languages work, and a notification system that tracks issues in W3C working groups related to the Chinese script. See a list of unresolved questions for Chinese experts. Each section below points to related discussions. See also the repository home page.
The Han script is an ideographic script. Letters typically represent a spoken syllable with its tone.
The Simplified Chinese orthography has a smaller repertoire and simpler shapes than the Traditional version.
The Chinese script is used as a common writing system by people who may speak a wide variety of Chinese languages, and who may pronounce the written text very differently. This is possible because the characters represent concepts rather than phonetics.
Text can be written in one of 2 directions: horizontally, left to right, or vertically with lines progressing from right to left. Vertically set text is more common in Traditional Chinese than Simplified Chinese areas. It was possible until recently to find Chinese text written horiztonally, right to left, but this doesn't normally occur in contemporary texts.
Words are not separated by spaces or any other character. There is no case distinction. The visual forms of characters don't interact.
A working set of characters for modern Chinese may include 10,000 characters, and number of characters in the Unicode Standard approaches 100,000 Han code points, many of which are archaic or esoteric. In fact, various regions define their own character sets, such as the 3,500 characters in the Tier I Table of 通用规范汉字表 (General Standard Chinese Characters) in Mainland China, the 4,808 characters in the Taiwanese 常用“国字”标准字体表 (Chart of Standard Forms of Common National Characters), the 4,759 characters in 常用字字形表 (Common Chinese Characters) in Hong Kong SAR, or the sets of 欢乐伙伴 ("Happy Buddy") characters for Singaporean primary schools.
The language is tonal, but the tones are not written explicitly.
As a general rule, Chinese has no combining marks, but ideographic tone marks may be used in contexts such as university literature courses and Chinese opera. On the other hand, Chinese has many punctuation marks. It also has a relatively complex set of typographic rules.