Chinese typography · 8 min read
Chinese Typography Basics for Designers
Every character is the same width, there is no italic and no word spaces. A practical primer on what changes when you set Chinese instead of Latin.
Published
Latin typography rests on assumptions that simply do not hold in Chinese. Letters have different widths; words are separated by spaces; italics mark emphasis; lines break at word boundaries. None of these are true for Chinese, and a designer who carries them over produces work that looks subtly wrong to every Chinese reader.
Here is what actually changes, and what to do instead.
Every character is a square
Chinese characters are designed to fill a square em box, and every character occupies the same width regardless of how many strokes it contains. 一 with one stroke and 齉 with thirty-six take up identical space.
This has consequences that ripple through everything. Text is inherently monospaced, so columns align without effort and grid-based layout is natural. There is no kerning to do — the spacing is built into the design of each glyph. And character count maps directly to physical width, which is why Chinese length limits are specified in characters and why a Chinese layout can be planned arithmetically in a way a Latin one cannot.
It also means Chinese text is visually denser than Latin text at the same point size. A line of Chinese carries more ink and more meaning per centimetre, which is why the line-length and leading conventions differ.
No spaces between words
Chinese runs characters together continuously. Word boundaries are inferred by the reader, not marked by the writer.
For layout, this means a line can break almost anywhere. There is no hyphenation and no need for it — the text simply wraps at the edge of the measure. Justified Chinese text is therefore genuinely justified, with no rivers and no stretched word spaces, which is why full justification is the default in Chinese publishing where ragged-right dominates in English.
There are rules about where a line may not break, collectively called 禁则处理 or, borrowing the Japanese term, kinsoku. Closing punctuation — 。、！？ and closing brackets — may not start a line, and opening brackets and quotation marks may not end one. Well-implemented text engines handle this automatically; poorly implemented ones produce lines starting with a full stop, which reads as obviously broken.
Punctuation is full-width
Chinese punctuation occupies a full em box like any other character, with the mark typically positioned in one half and the rest as built-in space. This is why you never add a space after a Chinese comma — the space is already there.
Several marks have no Latin equivalent. 、 is the enumeration comma, used between items in a list, where ， is used between clauses. Using ， for both is a common error in text set by non-native designers. 《》 mark titles of books, films and articles, doing the job of English italics. 「」 and 『』 are the traditional quotation marks, standard in Taiwan and Hong Kong, while mainland China uses “ ”.
The full stop is a small circle, 。, not a dot. Mixing half-width Latin punctuation into Chinese text — using . and , instead of 。 and ， — is one of the most visible signs of text that was not set by someone who reads the language.
Emphasis without italics
Chinese has no italic tradition. Slanting characters is not a stylistic variant; it is geometric distortion of glyphs whose proportions are structural. Faux italic applied to Chinese looks like a rendering bug.
The traditional device is the emphasis mark, 着重号: a small dot placed beneath each emphasised character. It is still used in print, especially in textbooks and literary editions, and CSS supports it directly through text-emphasis.
In practice, modern Chinese design mostly emphasises with weight and colour. Use a heavier weight from the same family, a different colour, or a background highlight. Do not use faux bold — algorithmically thickening strokes causes dense characters to fill in and become illegible blobs. Use a real bold weight, which is why font families with multiple genuine weights matter more in Chinese than in Latin.
For book and film titles, use 《》 rather than italics. This is not a stylistic preference; it is the correct punctuation.
Mixing Chinese with Latin text
Mixed-script text is extremely common — brand names, technical terms, numbers, acronyms — and it needs deliberate handling.
Insert a small gap, conventionally about a quarter em, between a Chinese run and an adjacent Latin run. Without it the two scripts collide visually. Some layout engines do this automatically; most do not, and in CSS it can be approximated with a thin space or handled by the text-spacing property where supported.
Size the Latin text up relative to the Chinese, or the Chinese down. Latin letters have smaller x-heights relative to their em box than Chinese characters have stroke coverage, so at nominally equal sizes the Latin looks too small. A 10-15% adjustment usually balances them.
Pair fonts deliberately. Many Chinese families ship with a designed Latin companion — Source Han Sans includes Source Sans, for instance — and using the pair gives you matched weights and proportions. Falling back to whatever the system supplies produces a mismatch in weight and style that is immediately visible.
Sensible defaults to start from
If you are setting Chinese body text and want reasonable values without research, these will not embarrass you.
- Font size: 16-18px for screen body text, slightly larger than you would set Latin.
- Line height: 1.6-1.8. Chinese fills its box vertically, so lines need more separation than Latin at the same value.
- Line length: 25-35 characters. Longer lines are much harder to track than the equivalent Latin measure.
- Letter spacing: zero for body text. Positive tracking only for short display strings.
- Alignment: full justification is conventional and works cleanly, since there are no word spaces to stretch.
- Paragraph indent: two characters (2em) is the Chinese convention, rather than the smaller Latin indent or a blank line.
Key takeaways
- Every Chinese character occupies an identical square, so text is inherently monospaced.
- No word spaces means lines break anywhere and full justification works cleanly.
- Chinese punctuation is full-width — never add a space after 。 or ，.
- There is no italic; emphasise with weight, colour or the traditional dot mark.
- Set line height at 1.6-1.8 and lines at 25-35 characters.
Frequently asked questions
Should I justify Chinese text?
Yes, generally. Full justification is the publishing convention and produces clean results because there are no word spaces to stretch — the only adjustment is to punctuation spacing.
How do I indent a Chinese paragraph?
By two full-width characters — text-indent: 2em. This is the standard convention and differs from the smaller first-line indent used in English typography.
What about numbers and dates?
Arabic numerals are standard in modern Chinese for most numeric content. Chinese numerals (一二三) appear in formal, legal and decorative contexts. Dates are written largest unit first: 2026年9月14日.