Chinese/Mandarin tips

[Brighton Lance]

I've been asked by a client to design at 60-page report in English and also produce a version in Mandarin.

I don't have any experience of the latter, is it reasonably straightforward to produce in InDesign? I have produced reports in the past in Kiswahili, Ukranian and a few others and has been ok, similar to jobs I've done in French and Spanish where I've found text generally comes out at about a third longer than the English and have so tweaked the para style accordingly.

Is there a particular font available within CC that people would recommend?

Many thanks for any advice.

[Jens Trost · Accepted solution]

Hi @Brighton Lance 
I can't give you real advice since I'm definitely no expert on this and have only done 2-3 japanese/chinese broschures. So please don't take my word for it 😉

But the one thing I expierenced is that chinese characters take a lot more space than e.g. english text.
Depending on the layout your report can easily look cluttered, but on the other hand you don't want to make the chinese text to small because it's important (at least that's what I've figured/read) to distinguish the characters with all their fine lines...

[Brighton Lance]

Cool, very useful advice, thank you

[Jens Trost]

You're welcome 🙂

Afterthought: if you have some kind of art college in your neighborhood and you wanna do it right perhaps you find some chineses students which can tell you the tricks of the trade 😉

I basically just did the projects to "western standards" with some superficial "Google-knowledge" of chinese typography (if you even can call it that) – and although it was proof-read by the respective subsidiaries a chinese designer would probably tear my work apart 😉
 

[Brighton Lance]

Yes, tahnks you. I have arranged with the clinet for them to send me a forward test section of a few pages, I'm going to design and send back for their feedback.