justfont and the Development of Taiwanese Typography: A Short History from DynaComware's 25 Years to JinXuan's 76 Minutes

30-second overview: On the afternoon of September 8, 2015, Taiwanese type foundry justfont put a typeface called JinXuan (金萱) up on flyingV. In 76 minutes it hit its NT$1.5 million goal, in 11 hours it crossed NT$10 million, and in 58 hours it broke NT$20 million, ultimately closing at NT$25,930,099 from 7,667 backers and rewriting Taiwan's crowdfunding record ¹. But the island's first commercial Chinese typeface had appeared as early as 1987: that year DynaLab (later renamed DynaComware) was founded and went on to make MingLiU and PMingLiU for Windows, and on June 8, 2015, the default Chinese typeface "PingFang" that Apple unveiled at WWDC was also DynaComware's ². For 25 years, no one in Taiwan made a new Chinese typeface — not because they couldn't, but because "an average of 3.8 characters per type designer per day" was a workload that drove everyone away ³. In the same decade, Source Han Sans was open-sourced by Adobe and Google in 2014 ⁴; Professor Wang Hann-sheng released 48 self-made Chinese typefaces under GPL v2 ⁵; cwTeX walked from the desk of NTU economics professor Wu Tsong-min into the open-source community ⁶ — JinXuan had many sibling projects. What it represented was the moment all of these streams finally converged in public consciousness.

Who drew the "Apple" character on the iPhone?

June 8, 2015. Moscone West, third floor, San Francisco. Apple unveiled iOS 9 and OS X 10.11 El Capitan at WWDC 2015, and announced a new feature: "PingFang" would become the default Chinese typeface for watchOS, tvOS, macOS, iOS, and iPadOS ⁷.

PingFang has 6 weights and 3 versions — Simplified Chinese (SC), Traditional Chinese for Taiwan (TC), and Traditional Chinese for Hong Kong (HK). From that day forward, every Chinese character seen on hundreds of millions of iPhones around the world came from a single Taiwanese company: DynaComware (威鋒數位).

DynaComware's headquarters is at 5F, No. 3-1, Yuanqu Street, Nangang District, Taipei ⁸. Its previous name was DynaLab (華康科技), founded in 1987 and renamed DynaComware in October 2001 ⁹. In the era of the ETen Chinese System, it sold ROM font cards under the name "DynaLab Golden Butterfly Card." After Windows 3.1, it partnered with Microsoft on Chinese localization, and MingLiU, PMingLiU, and DFKai-SB are all its work ¹⁰: those three typefaces accompanied the entire 1990s through to the 2010s in Taiwan, present on every government-office computer, every official document, every university report.

But almost no one on this island knew where DynaComware was, or who the people making those characters were.

DynaComware made commercial fonts for 25 years, was the top-selling font foundry in the Japanese market for 15 consecutive years, and produced Apple's PingFang ¹¹. It never appeared on the cover of a Taiwanese design magazine, never published a font origin story, never opened a flyingV crowdfunding page.

📝 Curator's note
PingFang is the contrast anchor of this article. It tells us: "Taiwan is capable of producing world-class Chinese typefaces" started in 1987 — a full 25 years before JinXuan. But being capable and becoming a public conversation are separated by a 25-year dark zone. JinXuan filled the gap in public perception; the technical gap had long since been filled.

NT$1.5 million in seventy-six minutes

Back to the afternoon of September 8, 2015, on flyingV. JinXuan's 30-day crowdfunding launched ¹.

76 minutes after going live, the campaign passed NT$1,500,000, hitting its minimum funding goal ¹². Within 11 hours, it crossed NT$10 million. 58 hours later, it had passed NT$20 million. The campaign that had been planned for 60 days closed in 30, finally settling at NT$25,930,099 from 7,667 backers ¹.

Leading this battle was a Taiwanese font company with just four full-time employees at the time, called justfont. Its three co-founders ¹³:

• Yeh Chun-lin (Michael): CEO. Before founding the company, he was a PM at DynaComware for around 6–7 years.
• Lin Hsia (Aresa): Type Director. Originally from Yilan, with over 30 years of experience in type design — affectionately known as "Sister Hsia."
• Su Wei-hsiang (BBC, Winston): Marketing Director. Born in 1989, graduate of NTU's Department of Chinese Literature.

The company itself was founded in 2010 by Yeh Chun-lin, originally as the world's first Chinese web-font service, justfont webfont ¹⁴. Su Wei-hsiang joined in 2012 as the first formal employee, and that same year, together with Lin Hsia and Yeh Chun-lin, started a Facebook page called "Zilien" (字戀, "in love with type") ¹⁵.

From the start, the Zilien page didn't teach design theory. It did something simple: using one prose piece after another, it told Taiwanese readers about the typographic stories hiding in the street signs, the metro line markers, the plastic signage of laundromats. Over a decade it accumulated 143,000 likes. Alongside it came the 2014 bestseller A Walk Through Type: Chinese Typography in Everyday Life, co-written by Su Wei-hsiang and Ke Chih-chieh, founder of the Zihai community group ¹⁶, and the 2018 online course "The Stretchable Type Class" on Hahow, with nearly a thousand students ¹⁷.

The day JinXuan broke records, the Taiwanese public discovered for the first time that "typography can be an everyday object, a cultural conversation, something worth NT$2,980 to bring home and look at." Looking back on that battle in 2017 for Business Next, Su Wei-hsiang said: "Even now, I still find it a bit unbelievable. It was an underdog story, completely punching above our weight." ¹⁸

"20% sugar," "half sugar," "80% sugar"

JinXuan's weight names are very Taiwanese: W2 = 20% Sugar (二分糖), W3 = Less Sugar (微糖), W4 = 40% Sugar (四分糖), W6 = Half Sugar (半糖), W8 = 80% Sugar (八分糖) ¹⁹.

Naming weights after sugar levels on a bubble-tea menu had never been done in font history. Before this, weights were either numbers (W2 / W3 / W400 / W700) or English (Light / Regular / Medium / Bold / Heavy). Sticking "Half Sugar" onto a typeface embedded the typeface's tone into every street-corner bubble-tea shop in Taiwan — a portable cultural ID card.

By 2018, JinXuan completed all 9 weights (Half Sugar included) and 70,000+ commonly used glyphs, with the family accumulating 130,000 characters total ²⁰.

But JinXuan wasn't drawn by one person. Lin Hsia led the overall design, examining the skeleton and final-stroke angle of every character. A four-person full-time team, joined later by type designer Tseng Kuo-jung (who studied typography at Kyoto Seika University) and Lin Fang-ping ²¹, took the typeface from drafts to release over almost four years ²².

This connects to the real secret of Han-character type engineering.

Seventy-five characters a day

This number doesn't look like a number: Yeh Chun-lin told the INSIDE Side Chat podcast the figure is "an average of 3.8 hand-drawn Chinese characters per day," while a Central News Agency interview cited "an average of 3.5–5 characters per day" ²³.

Do the math: with the 13,053 most common characters in Traditional Chinese (Big5 Level 1's 5,401 + Level 2's 7,652) ²⁴, a single weight requires 3,250 type-designer working days, equivalent to 9 years of one-person work.

That's the watershed between Han-character typography and Latin typography.

Yeh Chun-lin put it lightly in his CNA interview: "No one wants to make fonts." ²⁵

That sentence concentrates a fact nobody wants to call out: DynaLab was making Chinese fonts before martial law was lifted, but the market reality of "fewer than three font sets sold per month" hadn't budged in 25 years ²⁶. In Taiwan in the early 2010s, "there was, in the entire industry, only one person who could really be called a type designer" (in Yeh Chun-lin's words to BIOS Monthly) ²⁷. In design departments, 49% of students said their schools had no typography requirement, and 31% said it was offered for only one semester — that was justfont's own 2018 survey ²⁸.

💡 Did you know?
A skilled Latin type designer can complete a common weight in about a year. A common weight of Chinese type takes 3–5 years from draft to release, and requires a full-time team of at least 4–6 people. This workload differential is the physical constant that has shaped the form of Taiwan's type industry. No one wanted to make new fonts not because of a lack of talent or willingness, but because of the brute fact of nine-person-years per weight.

Whether the "grass radical" connects on top of "Xuan"

JinXuan also has its controversies.

In the Ministry of Education's standard glyph form, the "grass radical" (艹) above the character "Xuan" (萱) is not connected — the central vertical stroke is broken ²⁹. But justfont chose a connected "grass radical" in JinXuan, departing from the MOE standard.

This was a design choice, not an oversight. The designers felt the connected form was closer to the calligraphic tradition, and that most users wouldn't notice. But the decision meant any document checked against the MOE standard glyph would flag JinXuan as "non-compliant."

justfont later resolved this conflict using an OpenType variant glyph scheme — both forms hidden in the same font, switched on by an OpenType feature ³⁰. It's a technical compromise, but it reveals something: there's an unignorable tension between type designers and the MOE's standard glyph. Designers inherit the aesthetic of calligraphy; the standard glyph reflects the bureaucracy's definition of "correct." Where the two collide, every brushstroke is political.

In 2020, JinXuan ran into a bigger event. A Chinese student studying in Japan submitted a final-year project featuring a "JinHei" typeface, which Yeh Chun-lin determined, after comparison, was directly modified from JinXuan ³¹. The Japanese university's response: under Japanese copyright law, typefaces don't possess the basic characteristics of copyright. The matter eventually fizzled out.

⚠️ The paradox
Typefaces have copyright protection in Taiwan (listed under Article 5, Paragraph 1, Item 6 of the Copyright Act as a "fine art work"), no copyright in Japan, and ambiguous enforcement in China. As a typeface walks out the door, the laws of each country judge whether it "exists" by different rules. That's also why Taiwanese type companies have such trouble copying the global expansion model of a Silicon Valley SaaS startup.

A professor puts 48 typefaces online

Rewind to the 2000s.

Professor Wang Hann-sheng, of the Department of Mathematics at Chung Yuan Christian University, put 10 self-made Chinese typefaces online for free download ⁵. The license was GNU GPL v2, meaning anyone could use them commercially, with the only condition that derivative works adopt the same license.

That was the year 2000. Taiwan's font market was still dominated by DynaLab and Arphic, and no one was doing this. Commercial Chinese typefaces went for NT$8,000–30,000 per set at the time, with corporate licenses costing far more. A university professor putting 48 typefaces (Ming, Round, Hei, Song, Kai, and cursive series) on Google Code amounted to dumping a bucket of cold water on the era's font industry ³².

Wang's typefaces were not commercially polished, with technical details that could be improved. In 2005, Arphic Technology questioned the "high similarity" between Wang's fonts and its own, and some open-source software sites briefly took them down ³³. But Wang did not retract the license. His 48 typefaces were later donated to the Software Liberty Association of Taiwan, and they remain downloadable from a GitHub mirror today ³⁴.

On the same open-source axis, NTU Department of Economics professor Wu Tsong-min, together with his brother Wu Tsong-hui and Ueng Hung-ling, produced the cwTeX Chinese Fonts between 1999 and 2004 ⁶ — five styles (Ming, Kai, Round, Hei, and Fangsong), released under GPL v2. The fonts were originally made so Taiwanese scholars could typeset Chinese papers in LaTeX. From 2008, Chen-Pan Liao started the cwtex-q-fonts improvement project, fixing glyph widths and punctuation baselines, and changed the license to SIL OFL 1.1 in 2014 ³⁵.

Wang Hann-sheng and cwTeX together represent a thread that JinXuan's story has obscured: Taiwan's font open-source movement preceded its crowdfunding moment. By 15 years.

Lin Hsia, Lanyang Mingti, and the early Republic of China

In 2021, Lin Hsia's Lanyang Mingti (蘭陽明體, Lanyang Ming) raised over NT$20 million on the WaBay platform ³⁶. PTS's flagship drama Gold Leaf used the typeface ahead of its release, putting this Yilan-rooted Ming-style typeface on television ³⁷.

The design lineage of Lanyang Mingti runs deeper than JinXuan's. Lin Hsia traced visual sources in early-Republican thread-bound books, Yilan local gazetteers, and old printing samples, translating a Ming-dynasty engraved-character style — one that no living calligrapher still wrote in — into a 21st-century digital type system. The engineering scope went far beyond what "revival" can cover: this typeface used 21st-century industrial workflows to keep a nearly-forgotten visual lineage alive.

This is a different line from JinXuan. JinXuan wanted to enter daily life (bubble-tea menu naming, Zilien's signage walks, Hahow courses); Lanyang Mingti wanted to catch a piece of history nearly snapping.

In an interview with Crowd Watch, Lin Hsia said: "Once you make a typeface, it's a lifetime." ³⁸ The line is short, but it speaks to the other side of the workload of Han-character typography — a type designer choosing a typeface's visual direction is choosing where the next several years of their life go.

The line continues with justfont's own Ningshu Ti (凝書體, 2019, raised over NT$18 million on Zeczec) ³⁹, Jiran Ti (激燃體), Taiwan Road Type (台灣道路體), and Kamabit (柑仔蜜) — Shen Tsai-jou walked Taiwanese streets photographing old-shop signage, and the typeface launched on January 15, 2025 ⁴⁰ — one type family after another grown out of distinctively Taiwanese visual contexts.

Seven thousand characters, seven thousand people, and seven years

On March 14, 2020, justfont released a typeface called jf open Huninn (粉圓), completely free, under OFL 1.1 ⁴¹. Built on Japan's Kosugi Maru and Varela Round, it added 2,700+ glyphs (including Taiwanese romanization, Min-nan/Hakka phonetic).

This was justfont fulfilling a promise from JinXuan's crowdfunding page — back then, the page promised that, on hitting a stretch goal, they would give back a fully free typeface to the Taiwanese community. From the 2015 promise to the 2020 release, they took 5 years to settle that debt.

Later, in July 2023, justfont open-sourced jf 7000 Dangwu Zi-ji (jf 7000 當務字集) ⁴². CC BY-SA 4.0, 7,000 commonly used Taiwanese characters plus expansion sets. This filled gaps that Source Han Sans left in "characters specific to Taiwanese usage," such as certain Hakka, indigenous-language, and Tâi-lô characters used only in Taiwan.

Together, the two open-source typefaces are justfont's gift back to Taiwan's typographic public good.

✦ "Once you make a typeface, it's a lifetime." — Lin Hsia ³⁸

Source Han Sans: the open-source moment one year before JinXuan

Looking back, JinXuan was not the only event that changed Taiwan's typographic landscape. It wasn't even the most important one.

On July 15, 2014, fully 14 months before JinXuan's crowdfunding, Adobe and Google jointly released Source Han Sans (Noto Sans CJK) ⁴. Released to coincide with Adobe's 25th anniversary, it was placed alongside Adobe's full Source font family. Seven weights, full support for Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean glyph variants (plus Latin, Greek, Cyrillic), under SIL Open Font License 1.1, freely downloadable for commercial use by anyone.

To produce the family, Adobe and Google partnered with East Asian houses: SinoType in China, Iwata in Japan, Sandoll in Korea. The full series contains nearly half a million glyphs, with each weight reaching the OpenType technical limit of 65,535 glyphs.

Convert that into justfont's "3.8 characters per day" benchmark, and a single weight of Source Han Sans (65,535 / 3.8) = 17,246 type-designer working days = 47 years per person. In reality Adobe and Google completed it in three years, because they mobilized three East Asian font foundries and dozens of designers in parallel.

After Source Han Sans, Taiwanese designer But Ko (administrator of the Zihai community) developed GenYoMin (源樣明體) based on Source Han Serif ⁴³. Later came GenRyuMin, GenWanMin, FanWunMing (which can handle one-Simplified-to-many-Traditional mappings), and other derivatives — all open-source.

During JinXuan's record-setting 30 days, someone in Taiwan was writing letters in Source Han Sans, someone was experimenting with cwTeX's Ming for an academic paper, someone was downloading Wang Hann-sheng's hand-made round typeface from Google Code. "Chinese typefaces made by Taiwan" was never a one-person project — it was the result of four streams advancing simultaneously: large foundries (DynaLab, Arphic), academic open source (Wang Hann-sheng, cwTeX), cross-border collaboration (Source Han, GenYoMin), and emerging boutique brands (justfont and the independent designers it has mentored).

It's just that on the afternoon of September 8, 2015, in those 76 minutes, the four streams converged in public perception for the first time.

"No one wants to make fonts"

On March 25, 2024, Yeh Chun-lin sat for a Central News Agency interview ²⁵. He said one line that has since been quoted in nearly every justfont article since:

"No one wants to make fonts."

That line carries particular weight against the 2024 Taiwanese type landscape. Arphic Technology was acquired by Japanese type giant Morisawa in April 2022 ⁴⁴, turning a publicly listed Taiwanese type company into a Japanese subsidiary. DynaComware's PingFang remains the iPhone's default Chinese typeface, but the company is still invisible to the Taiwanese public. justfont itself in 2024 still has only a 10-plus-person team, with 90% of revenue from B2C consumer markets — extremely rare for a type company globally ⁴⁵.

But ten years on, Taiwan's type landscape continues to shift. Lanyang Mingti, Ningshu Ti, Kamabit — the next generation of type designers Lin Hsia has trained are translating more old printing samples and old shop signs into digital typefaces. jf 7000 and Open Huninn fill characters specific to Taiwanese usage into the open-source world. An island where no one wanted to make new fonts for 25 years now probably has 30–50 people seriously working on new typefaces — not many, but they exist.

Yeh Chun-lin once told Thecan Magazine: "Once consumers have an awareness of type design, the market will come alive." ⁴⁶ That line is closer to what justfont actually changed than "no one wants to make fonts." It didn't make the market larger — that was the work of the big foundries and cross-border collaborations; what it changed was the eyes of consumers — letting 143,000 Zilien fans start to genuinely look at every shop sign, every book, every chat-window character, and know that someone hand-drew it.

When the act of drawing characters becomes visible, only then does someone else become willing to learn how to draw them.

Further reading

• Taiwan new media art (台灣新媒體藝術) — another case driven by the design community, growing across disciplines, and reopening dialogue with Taiwan's manufacturing tradition
• The Reporter: a decade of rescuing investigative reporting from a line item to a public good (報導者) — another public-good ecosystem sustained by strangers' payments
• Social movements and civic participation (社會運動與公民參與) — the larger context for crowdfunding as a new tool for civil society
• Submarine cables: visible above the silicon shield, the lifeline invisible below — typography is visible cultural infrastructure, submarine cables are invisible communications infrastructure; together they form the dual axis of Taiwan's "cultural sovereignty"

References