Multilingual Typesetting on the Web

with Marie Otsuka

This workshop will cover a variety of technical techniques for typesetting multiple scripts on websites, with a focus on CJK writing systems.

Typesetting different languages together can be a challenge for online projects. This 2-day intensive will review HTML and CSS techniques on formatting typography for multiple scripts, especially with East Asian languages. We will begin with the basics of using web fonts, including an understanding of glyph subsets and fallbacks, and move to advanced techniques in refining typography for language-specific design conventions such as vertical typesetting. Participants will need no prior knowledge of these languages for this workshop but should be prepared to dive into code. Because the presenter’s language expertise is in English and Japanese, some examples will be based on these two scripts but technical concepts may be applied to other languages. Participants should bring their own web project with their preferred languages to apply learnings from the workshop.