How the first computer fonts for Chinese characters were created
Posted: Sat Feb 01, 2025 6:19 am
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, China was not producing personal computers. To create the first PC with Chinese language support, American scientist Bruce Rosenblum's team reprogrammed an Apple II and hand-drawn and digitized thousands of Chinese characters. Here are the challenges designers faced in developing one of the first Chinese fonts, both technically and aesthetically.
Technical limitations
The DOS 3.3 operating system on the Apple II did not support input and output of text with Chinese characters. Therefore, Rosenblum's team had to write their own operating system from scratch. The scientist also created Gridmaster, a text editor, on the basis of which one of the world's first Chinese digital fonts would be developed. The program was written in the BASIC programming language, and it took several months to create it.
Encoding of the Chinese character dian (电, electricity) in hungary number data Gridmaster on Sinotype III. In-text photo: Louis Rosenblum Collection / Stanford University Library Special Collections
The future font was intended for an experimental device called the Sinotype III, which was one of the first personal computers to support Chinese characters. It was developed at the Graphics Arts Research Foundation (GARF) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Despite its simplicity, Gridmaster was used to complete a complex design task: creating digital bitmaps for several thousand Chinese characters. A bitmap is a way of storing visual information in digital form, such as in JPEG, GIF, or BMP format, using a grid of pixels.
Creating the Chinese font for Sinotype III took much longer than programming the computer itself. For each character, the designers had to make 256 different decisions, one for each possible pixel in the bitmap. Thus, during the development process, which lasted more than two years, hundreds of thousands of such decisions were created for thousands of characters.
With Gridmaster, Rosenblum's father, Louis Rosenblum, and the GARF staff were able to bring an entire team of designers into the fold. The program ran on any Apple II computer from a floppy disk and allowed new raster images to be created and stored remotely. The Rosenblums could then load them into the Sinotype III database using another program also created by Bruce.
Technical limitations
The DOS 3.3 operating system on the Apple II did not support input and output of text with Chinese characters. Therefore, Rosenblum's team had to write their own operating system from scratch. The scientist also created Gridmaster, a text editor, on the basis of which one of the world's first Chinese digital fonts would be developed. The program was written in the BASIC programming language, and it took several months to create it.
Encoding of the Chinese character dian (电, electricity) in hungary number data Gridmaster on Sinotype III. In-text photo: Louis Rosenblum Collection / Stanford University Library Special Collections
The future font was intended for an experimental device called the Sinotype III, which was one of the first personal computers to support Chinese characters. It was developed at the Graphics Arts Research Foundation (GARF) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Despite its simplicity, Gridmaster was used to complete a complex design task: creating digital bitmaps for several thousand Chinese characters. A bitmap is a way of storing visual information in digital form, such as in JPEG, GIF, or BMP format, using a grid of pixels.
Creating the Chinese font for Sinotype III took much longer than programming the computer itself. For each character, the designers had to make 256 different decisions, one for each possible pixel in the bitmap. Thus, during the development process, which lasted more than two years, hundreds of thousands of such decisions were created for thousands of characters.
With Gridmaster, Rosenblum's father, Louis Rosenblum, and the GARF staff were able to bring an entire team of designers into the fold. The program ran on any Apple II computer from a floppy disk and allowed new raster images to be created and stored remotely. The Rosenblums could then load them into the Sinotype III database using another program also created by Bruce.