Marketo Email and Landing Page Templates in Japanese

[Elise_Stieren]

Hello, 

I will soon be tasked with building programs for our marketing partners in Japan. I have seen this post, but cannot determine my next steps. What does it mean "declare English target fonts before Chinese target fonts, because English language fonts do not contain the glyphs for Chinese characters, but Chinese fonts do contain a-z characters..."

I am NOT a developer but if I'm understanding the little bit of literature on this, it's looking like I need to create new asset templates as my current templates may not accommodate the distinct font families that work with the language in question's characters/glyphs.

Would love for someone to flesh out a step by step for this task? Again I'm not a developer, but if I know what needs to be done, I might be able to contract for one. 

Thank you!

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

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What does it mean "declare English target fonts before Chinese target fonts, because English language fonts do not contain the glyphs for Chinese characters, but Chinese fonts do contain a-z characters..."

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A user-agent (mail client, web browser, etc.) chooses a max of 2 fonts that may be the source of a given glyph:

1. the first font in the font-family list that is available as either a webfont, locally installed custom font, or system font (pre-installed in the OS)
2. a fallback font, typically one of the OS-native fonts; it’s possible for there to be no fallback font, though

So let’s say you want to display the CJK ideograph 水 (Unicode character 6C34) and your text also has the simple Latin-1 character W.

Since you don’t want to rely on the fallback font having either of those characters, you want the user-agent to choose a font that has both of them. A CJK-focused font like MS Mincho has both; a generic font like Arial only has the W (though modern Arial does have the glyphs for many other languages, like Hebrew and Arabic, just not CJK).

So if you put Arial first, as Arial is present on almost every machine, the system will stop there. But then it won’t have a glyph for 水. If MS Mincho is first, it’ll be able to supply both glyphs from that font.

Note: the idea that “Chinese fonts do contain a-z characters, but not vice versa” (which would better phrased as “Chinese fonts do contain Latin-1 characters...”) is indeed true in practice, but it’s not defined by a standard or anything. It‘s quite possible for a font to only have Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters and punctuation; it’s just rare.

You also aren’t obliged to use the same font for all visitors. I definitely wouldn’t try to use MS Mincho everywhere. You want to choose a font that fits the distinct cultural styles of each of your audiences, meaning your font-family cascade should be different depending on the page’s locale/language.

[SanfordWhiteman]

@Elise_Stieren please return to your thread and check replies.

[Elise_Stieren]

Apologies @SanfordWhiteman I unfortunately am not in a fulltime operations role (yet) so am in a balancing act with other marketing functions. I think my issue is that this is still very much over my head.

My goal is to ensure my templates (emails, landing pages, and forms) render and format Japanese characters correctly.

I think I understand that I need to use a font that recognizes/displays these characters, and some western fonts don't...like Arial which we commonly use. 

We also use Helvetica. 

I'm just not certain where to begin...how do I reach my goal? I don't have a developer on staff and this is my task to figure out.

[SanfordWhiteman]

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My goal is to ensure my templates (emails, landing pages, and forms) render and format Japanese characters correctly.

I think I understand that I need to use a font that recognizes/displays these characters, and some western fonts don't...like Arial which we commonly use. 

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Right. Though I would say “contains” rather than “recognizes/displays”: a font file literally contains a fixed set of graphical characters.

If it doesn’t have a given character, either another font must be chosen (fallback font) or you get a universal replacement character �.

The point cannot be to try to get every single page to render Japanese characters correctly. That will just lead to pages that are all in English (or French or Arabic for that matter) using a font that isn’t the best fit for those languages. As I mentioned MS Mincho has all the Latin-1 characters. But it’s a very unfamiliar feel for English text:

(I kind of like Mincho personally, but it lends everything a clear “Eastern” flair. It’s not meant for all-Western text.)

So you need to have to have a variable that can be set per page (i.e. a template variable) that switches the font stack based on whether the text is non-CJK only or whether it’s partially or completely CJK. For non-CJK your stack could start with Arial. For CJK it would only include CJK-centric fonts. You wouldn’t just use the same stack anywhere regardless of the real-world content of a page.

[Elise_Stieren]

Ahhh so find the font style that's set-up for CJK and upload it into the design studio, then add it to our CSS coding. Next steps achieved!

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

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Ahhh so find the font style that's set-up for CJK and upload it into the design studio,

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font-family but yes.