character encoding, script, typeface/font

Question

I'd like to know what relationship ties those terms. According to wikipedia,

"There is however no mandated connection between the encoding system and the font used to display the characters; font and encoding are usually tied together for practical reasons".

Yet, I do not fully grasp what that means.

Is there a systematic comparison between the different strokes that the main typefaces apply to chinese characters?

Is the regular script sans-serif? what typeface does wikimedia use for regular script?

Answer 1

There is however no mandated connection between the encoding system
and the font used to display the characters

considering the situation: an utf-8 encoded plain text file (*.txt), how do it display on the computer, is depend on the user, not the author.

in stkaiti:

in hanzipen tc:

in songti tc:

the same content can be displayed by different fonts, to give different impression.

font and encoding are usually tied together for practical reasons

in pre-unicode era, as i remember, on mac os, all big-5 encoded text is defaulted to display initially by the system font "taibei"; while shift jis encoded text would use the font "osaka". in modern days (utf-8), mac / windows are smart enough to choose the font automatically, to display each code point.

for chinese character, the concepts "serif", "sans serif", "script" are, inapplicable.

for this question, i would suggest you read the book "CJKV Information Processing", published by o'really; which is informative & authoritative:

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596514471.do

they provided the 1st chapter in pdf:

ftp://ftp.oreilly.com/examples/nutshell/cjkv/pdf/CJKVInfoProc.Chap1.pdf