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Orach Technic CJK MANIFEST
About the Chinese Writing System
When the early peoples of the Western world began carving sounds into stone,the ancient Chinese began inscribing words.
In this lies the fundamental difference between the two great approaches to writing.
For me, the exact dates are not of crucial importance; both traditions reach deep into pre-Christian times.
There are many fine descriptions of the history of Chinese writing and its system available online,
and there is no need for me to repeat them here.
Anyone can easily find that today, so I will focus only on what I consider most important for the reader.
For the Chinese, meaning was more important than sound — the word carried the essence and had to be preserved.
From this idea, Chinese characters emerged — symbols created to record meaning rather than pronunciation.
Across a vast empire where numerous dialects were spoken, written characters became a bridge.
People who could not understand one another in speech could still understand each other on paper.
This was possible because every character represents meaning
a stable idea that remains unchanged even as spoken language evolves.
The Chinese believed:
“If we bind a character to a single sound, we lose the wisdom of our ancestors.”
This is the essence of the Chinese — and later also Japanese and Korean — logographic tradition of writing.
While dialects changed across the empire, the written form remained unified, allowing literacy to cross linguistic borders.
Western cultures, on the other hand, chose the simplicity and speed of phonetic writing — systems based on sound.
And the Serbs went one step further: they created a fully phonetic alphabet, in which one writes exactly as one speaks.
“Write as you speak” became their guiding principle — practical and accessible to everyone.
Thus, two worlds of writing emerged:
one that preserves meaning through characters, and another that preserves sound through letters,
each with its own distinct wisdom.
And just as the old saying reminds us, “One cannot compare the advantages of one system with the weaknesses of another,”
in the same spirit we attempt the following:
Our Orach Technic system does not favor either of these two writing systems, nor does it oppose them as rivals.
We simply strive to harmonize them in style, size, and writing technique
as if they were all written by someone who truly understands them,
with a single, well-formed and confident hand.
This is the main reason for our decision to begin work on the Orach Technic CJK font,
which will be fully compatible with our already developed Orach Technic Pro font.
* * *
What we can offer today
Orach Technic Pro 6.35 - All glyphs
(.pdf document, 56MB, 108 page)
*Orach Technic Pro is a InfoFORM's (Belgrade-Serbia) font,
developed from 1988 to 2025.