Why Chinese English text looks so odd

Buy enough inexpensive stuff from China, you start to notice how ... odd ... the English looks in instruction manuals, on packaging, etc. Not just the grammar, but the actual writing itself. Like this:

The kerning is off, if nothing else; folks note “the Latin alphabet not only tends to look odd, but the spacing is often skewed too,” and describe the font as “that godawful spindly Times variant with the nasty, nasty serifs.” One commentator surmises: “Add to the fact that the chinese fonts are fixed spaced, [you] get old looking letters.” (Note the ‘l’ and ‘i’ in “Sublimation,” and the spacing between ‘m’ and ‘a’...)

That Metafilter page contains some additional discussion about why Chinese English text is left in that state. (The screenshot linked to from that discussion is archived here.)

tl;dr: Basically, it’s (theorized to be) a combination of things. (a) Cheap, widespread fonts used in China that have Latin characters as essentially an afterthought. (b) A population not used to seeing proportional typefaces and thus not recognizing the issue with the kerning. (c) An “it gets the job done” approach. (Most Chinese products’ instruction manuals are not up to the standards of, say, Steve ‘More like a Porsche’ Jobs, but they’re also not exactly commanding Apple margins.)

So, now I have words to put to what I couldn’t really put my finger on. Happy Monday.