Vinyl Signs in your Language.

I got hooked on digital graphics design and desktop publishing waaay back when...  The root came from my involvement in  publishing when I joined the staff of my school's newspaper and yearbook (UCSB, '82~'83), where everything was done the old fashion way (copy was pasted onto the layout board using hot wax...). When desktop publishing came into the scene, my interest came naturally. I was especially motivated to apply my publishing knowledge toward other languages besides English (Vietnamese for instance).

That leads us to the present day, where my latest piece of  technology involving publishing is a vinyl plotter cutter. My "day job" actually needed some vinyl signage work done (in Japanese and Chinese). It was quickly discovered that "in house" cutting was needed since there are very few Multi-Lingual vinyl services available.

My work in designing Vietnamese fonts came handy, the unicode standard has done wonders for desktop publishing in other languages. Modern vinyl signage requires one key element: fonts. Specifically outline fonts such as the truetype standard used in all modern operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux/Unix). Unicode allows the inclusion of many more characters in a font, thousands vs. the old ASCII standard of 255. Keep in mind unicode is just a standard, many unicode fonts only have a subset of all available characters.  Multi-Lingual Truetype fonts began to emerge a few years back; led the way by Microsoft's "Arial Unicode MS", one of the most complete unicode font, including more than 50,000 glyfs (characters).

Many of the unicode fonts on the market cater only to a specific range of characters, for a specific language (i.e. Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, etc...). The unicode range is large enough to hold all of the world's present languages. One of the largest subrange is known as the "Unified CJK Ideographs"; aka Han Unified, the core characters for Chinese-Japanese-Korean. The standard is being expanded to include all characters from all known written languages (!). More on Unicode here.

The "samurai" example on the right is using Adobe's "Hensei Mincho Std W7", from the Hensei Standard family (more info here). For those are are familiar with "serif" (such as Times)  and "sans-serif" (such as Arial) classification, this is a serif equivalent of a font suitable for prints (newspaper). This is a more blocky and rigid design as compared to the more well known "calligraphy" form of Asian ideographs. When it comes to fonts, Adobe is the Ferrari in the business.

The example on the left is one letter in the Vietnamese alphabet; yes, modern Vietnamese is Latin based. Earlier Vietnamese is Han based, such as the CJK standard, sometimes referred to as CJKV - the "V" in this case is Han-based Vietnamese. The font is "UVN Cát Biển", from my collection of fonts now in the public domain. There are about 100 free fonts available here. Each was carefully crafted based on their western counterpart. The major difference of the UVN family is the careful placement of the accents above the base vowels, as well as an extensive list of kerning pairs.

The idea here is to provide a Vinyl signage service that can handle other languages. Whether it's alphabet based, or ideograph based, the availability of outline fonts in the language of interest will allow signage in your language. The fonts available can be sorted to a specific unicode subrange to ease the font selection process, especially if you are using a non-Latin based set.  If I don't have a font available in your language, just include a copy of your font in your submission. As long as your font follows the unicode standard, I can cut your sign.

Useful links:

• Text Preview Page. This page will let you type in the text of your choice, and preview the text with any available fonts. The preview page supports unicode, so all the world's popular languages are supported.  The page has a unique smart region detection  that will only list the applicable fonts (based on region) depending of the characters typed. So if you type you text in Chinese, only the fonts with characters from the East-Asia region will be listed. Please note that you may need to have your Windows Operating System configured for your region to display your language properly.

• Cliparts Search & Preview Page. Search the clipart database via keyword. You can also preview the clipart in the color of your choice.

• Submission Procedure.

• Unicode Resources Page. Links for more information on unicode.

• Applying Vinyl. Instructions to install your vinyl sign.