[Photo by Feng Yongbin/China Daily]

To design a typeface for English, one only need deal with the 26 letters in upper and lower case. If you add all the punctuation marks, numbers and special symbols such as accent signs, the total number of characters is about 200.

But for a typeface of Chinese that contains most of the common words, the designer has to create at least 6,763 characters, as listed in a key official character set issued by the national standardization administration in 1980.

A complete Chinese typeface product contains about 20,000 characters and could take years to design.

Zhu Zhiwei, 60, has seen the industry grow in China. He worked first in a printing house engraving characters in movable type in the 1970s.

"At that time I used to engrave difficult or rare characters in special typefaces," he says.

Since 1986 computer and laser printing have gradually replaced movable type in Chinese printing.

The first time Zhu touched a computer was when he was dispatched to Shenzhen, Guangdong province, in 1988 to help develop what was among the first input software for simplified Chinese.

Initially the typeface design company just bought sets of type from a printing house and scanned them into a computer, involving minimal design work.