Typefaces around the World

Today while watching Chinese tv channel, i thought about typography. As a westerner i've never thought that there are many designers in Japan, China, Arabic countries etc., who do not use Roman alphabet. There are also huge number of Roman alphabetic typefaces, how about those other languages ? Is there Helvetica in Japanese, Arial in Arabic and so on... ?

After browsing dozens of websites i came up with several typafaces developed for alphabets other than Roman. I recall some typography posters, where designer has used mixture of different alphabetic writing systems.

This is multilingual Tanseek typeface, developed by Linotype GmbH.

http://image.linotype.com/cms/tanseek_fontsample02_d28423i3.gif

This chocolate package is an example of design, where both Arabic and Latin writing systems are used. What also makes such design interesting is the fact, that Arabic is read from right to left.

http://www.atrissi.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/elhema-arabisch-choc_262e7d.jpg

Western alphabet has usually 20 to 50 letters depending on language, how about Chinese ? I just wonder how Chinese typeface designers cope with thousands of characters ? As Chinese and Japanse is often written from top to bottom, i believe that gives more flexibility for designers to arrange text and keep it legible, because people have used to read the characters from top to bottom and side to side. In Latin alphabet based languages, text is always written from left to right, so when text is arranged from top to bottom, it is not natural for us and makes it more difficult to read.

www.monotype.com.hk has a large collection of Chinese typefaces. Do they really have to design thousands of characters ? Does someone know the answer for that question ? Please, share your knowledge, Cheers :-)

http://www.monotype.com.hk/image/Big5/CHei3_B.gif