On the aspect and balance of Chinese characters

On the one hand, the development of printing technologies has greatly facilitated the dissemination of text written with Chinese characters. This is to be compared with ancient manuscript scrolls of text. On the other hand, printing has forced Chinese characters to be enclosed into a fixed 1:1 shape. This is the case for computer systems as well: although modern systems might tolerate aspect ratio flexibility to a certain extent, document processing by means of computers has pushed for Chinese character font design to, even approximately, retain the fixed 1:1 aspect ratio. When comparing the documents produced by our modern systems and ancient ones, it is clear that a significant part of the art of calligraphy has been lost, or is at least at a great risk of extinction. In this article, we aim to address this cultural heritage issue by conducting an ontological discussion focused on the aspect and balance of Chinese characters, whence we then derive solution hints for our modern computer systems to tentatively support greater flexibility with respect to the aspect ratio of characters.