Chinese Desktop Publishing Services

Chinese Desktop Publishing, typesetting and InDesign translation services by Tilti Multilingual – the highest quality by experienced DTP managers. We provide solutions for:

• handbooks
• brochures
• business cards
• posters
• other materials

Our experienced InDesign managers and native translators make sure that the content and the design are brought together accurately, retaining their intended meaning and appearance.

Contact us at [email protected] for any inquiries.
Use the form above to send us your files, and receive a proposal within an hour!

Specifics of Chinese DTP

The way you document looks like is influenced not only by its contents, but also by the specifics of the writing system used. The Chinese language employs the Chinese character Hanzi logograms. See further how it may influence the layout of your materials.

Text spacing

Chinese does not use spaces to separate one word from another. It means several things:

• each individual part of the text will be more clustered
• there will be more space between different textual parts of the document

Chinese characters are not joined within a word (i.e. not a cursive script), at least not obligatory. It means that spacing between letters can be applied relatively safely, if the design calls for it.

Capital or uppercase characters are not used i.e. the script is not case sensitive. It is thus advisable to not rely on uppercase too much. While making a particular part of the text just bigger will have a similar effect, it will not change the form of the characters.

Appearance

Hanzi characters traditionally do not use italics. There usually are just a few fonts that support designated italics, as there is no tradition of using them in the language. Slanting the text is always possible, but this may look unnatural, and so is not recommended.

The language is written in the left-to-right or top-to-bottom-to-left fashion. If the original text was in a language with the opposite writing direction, the overall layout should be mirrored in the process of desktop publishing.

The average word length in Chinese is 2 characters, which is 5 characters shorter than the average of all the languages. It is probable that your text will be able to contract and expand with much more flexibility. This applies to both dimensions, vertical and horizontal.