Why are CJK fonts so large?
A font which supports West European languages typically contains about 225 characters; one which also supports Cyrillic and Greek, as well as sundry symbols, contains about 650 characters. On the other hand, consider that a typical Japanese font contains at least 7000 characters some of which are made up of a large number of strokes. Is it any wonder that a CJK font file will be many times larger than a typical Latin font? (See the charts section for more information on the number of characters in common CJK fonts.
