When we talk about typography, the most common associations are print and Latin-based letters. Many associate printing with Gutenberg’s printing press, but the first moveable type was invented by Bi Sheng in China approximately 400 years earlier. And today, even though print has yet to fall out of favour, the explosion of the web has resulted in a lot of reading being done off screens of all sizes.

Analog typesetting is done with metal slugs, but the web uses CSS to set type. Modern CSS gives us the ability to set type for a dynamic medium, which is something relatively new, and requires us to look at typography with a fresh perspective. Chinese typography traversed its own parallel path of evolution over the centuries and this talk will cover the use of CSS as the typesetting tool of the web for both Chinese and Latin-based languages.