Mixing CJK and Latin Text

#cjk #typography #i18n 375 words 1 min read

This post is the English companion to a real CJK demo. Inkstone is opinionated about mixed-script typography — here’s what the theme does for you when an article mixes 中文 with English.

What Inkstone does for CJK

  1. Word counting respects characters, not whitespace tokens. With hasCJKLanguage = true set site-wide, Hugo’s .WordCount counts CJK characters individually instead of trying (and failing) to whitespace-tokenize them.
  2. Reading time uses 501 chars/min on CJK pages, the constant Hugo derives from CJK reading speed studies. Latin pages stay on the 213 word/min default.
  3. Font stack prefers LXGW WenKai, falling back through Noto Serif SC to system serif — chosen to keep CJK and Latin glyphs at compatible weights.
  4. Line-height bumps to 1.7 on CJK pages (vs. 1.6 for pure Latin) to compensate for taller character bodies.

Why this matters in practice

Mixed-script paragraphs are where naive themes break. A sentence like “我读了 Borges 的 Ficciones” has three writing systems and an italic stretch — and most themes either let the browser produce a fake oblique on CJK glyphs (ugly) or force a single font for everything (worse).

Inkstone scopes font-style: normal to the CJK-detected ranges in prose, so the Latin italics still render properly while the CJK characters stay upright in their natural form.

Punctuation and spacing

The .prose region opts into:

  • font-feature-settings: "palt" for proportional alternates on CJK punctuation — ， 。 ？ ！ collapse the half-em “air” they ship with by default.
  • text-spacing-trim to handle leading/trailing punctuation at line breaks.
  • A 0.15em soft gap between CJK characters and adjacent Latin/numeric runs (Pangu-style), scoped to prose only — UI chrome is left alone.

Try it on a real Chinese post

The translation of this post — 03-cjk-mixed.zh-cn.md — is where you can actually see the typography work. Switch the language toggle to view it.

content/posts/03-cjk-mixed.md         # this English post
content/posts/03-cjk-mixed.zh-cn.md   # the Chinese demo post

Summary

If you write a lot of bilingual prose, Inkstone aims to remove the typography distractions so you can focus on what the words are doing. Most of these decisions are scoped to .prose and won’t bleed into UI chrome, so they’re safe to compose with other themes’ design tokens if you fork.