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sebdea
Inspiring
May 7, 2025
Question

CJK fonts missing Italic - client drive me crazy

  • May 7, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 281 views

Hi,

 

I am working on many projects with InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop. Recently, I received a couple of documents that have been translated into several languages, including Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. The agency I am working for rejected the documents translated into Chinese and Korean for missing italics.  No matter how much I tried to explain that Chinese and Korean fonts do not have Italic, they are insisting on fixing them and constantly comparing the InDesign text with the MS Word text.

 

Since I am not tech-savvy, I have no clue why MS Word adds italics to the same Chinese and/or Korean font.

 

As I searched Adobe Fonts for Chinese and Korean fonts that might have Italic, I found none.

 

Any idea how to fix it? Is there any way around other source fonts from where I can buy/download Chinese and Korean fonts that have Italic? Why can MS Word make a font Italic while in InDesign the same font does not show Italic as an option?

 

Thanks in advance.

 

Sebastian

2 replies

Abambo
Community Expert
AbamboCommunity Expert
Community Expert
May 16, 2025

Basically, Word adds a slant to fonts, when there is no real italic available. They also add a faux bold, if no bold is available. That means that you can have a Thin font, and make that bold! 😉

 

One question that is important to ask is who did the translation?


I once had the situation, that a girl setting up a Chinese brochure for me replaced all the sentence points with Latin points because “she did not like those hollow points”. My Chinese partner explained to her that that is needed as such in Chinese.

 

This said, if they insist, you can always use the slant parameter. You will need to create a character style or paragraph style to do this consistently:

You will have the text exactly like with the Word italic…

 

ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer
Frank Grießhammer
Adobe Employee
Frank Grießhammer
Adobe Employee
May 9, 2025

Maybe mapping the distance from China to Italy would be needed to convince your client 🙂
Some more arguments for you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_punctuation#:~:text=For%20emphasis%2C%20Chinese%20uses%20emphasis%20marks%20instead%20of%20italic%20type.

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/20myco/can_chinese_writing_be_written_in_italics/

 

What MS Word is doing is just distorting the characters – it will do that with any font no matter the writing system. Try Arabic! 🙂

A good visual explanation of this is availabe in this article by Toshi Omagari:
https://tosche.net/jp/blog/italic-subtleties

 

Finally, some Japanese fonts provide Italic _Latin_ characters via the `ital` OpenType feature. However, this does not apply to the ideographic characters.

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