I am glad I live in the U.S. and do not have to worry about writing Chinese characters. My handwriting is bad enough, and I can’t imagine what it would look like if I had to reproduce the complexities of Chinese characters on a regular basis. Chinese characters have up to 29 or more strokes compared to a maximum of four with the Latin characters used for English. Small font sizes make the difficulty of reproducing these characters even greater.
I presented a technical paper on the “Mizen_Relationship Between Chinese Text Quality and Card Printing_20150928” at Imaging Science and Technology’s NIP31 International Conference on Digital Printing Technologies in Portland, OR on September 28, 2015.
Representative Chinese character with 19 strokes
- We cannot predict whether a given printing system will satisfactorily reproduce Chinese text. The best approach is to print and then evaluate sample text.
- High-contrast printing systems give the highest image quality.
- Resolution is important, with 600-1200 dpi required for small font sizes.
- White text on a black background is more difficult to reproduce that black text on white due to expansion of the printed area.
- Single color printing gives better quality than composite color.
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