If you can google in Chinese, I think you will get some results! For the recent new Japanese font for Vista, the Microsoft booklet "Now Read This" explains that a team designed many thousands of Chinese characters (called Kanji in Japanese) and then programmed the rest to scale the radicals to build new characters.

As you have correctly surmised, type design for ideographs (aka, Chinese characters) is complex. While there have been several methods for semi-automagically composing entire glyphs using a library of primitive stroke-like elements, Adobe creating one of them, the vast majority of Chinese and Japanese typefaces are designed one glyph at a time using a team of designers. The master designer first creates a smaller number of prototypical glyphs that serve as examples for the team of designers. These prototypical glyphs are important, because they contain almost all of the elements that make up the thousands (or tens of thousands) of glyphs that need to be made to complete the font. The time needed to complete the design of a single Chinese or Japanese font is measured in man-years.

Korean fonts include hangul, which represent an alphabetic writing system composed into square syllables. There has been greater success in automating the design of hangul using the primitive elements, called jamo.

Obviously, there is more to Chinese typeface design than I have summarized above. The best way to appreciate the work and effort that is involved is to visit one of the type foundries, to see first hand how it is done.

Dr. Ken Lunde
Senior Computer Scientist, CJKV Type Development
Adobe Systems Incorporated
lunde@adobe.com

Most characters can be described in terms of their radicals, of which there is a total of about 300. Individual stroke-types are generally only useful for learning how to move the calligraphy brush.

Because of the difficulties in maintaing 10s of thousands of characters, with many variants and obscure characters, in the history of Chinese printing, printers have generally found it more efficient to directly carve a plate for each page.

As Dr. Lunde states, each character is designed individually. This is due to the need for an aesthetic balance for each character. So far the best device for the "automagic" recombinations for each character has proved to be a writing utensil attached to the brain of an experienced calligrapher or designer.

The designs of most fonts are based on brush calligraphy (which has many different styles), and secondarily on a long tradition of wood plate printing (which of course is based on brush calligraphy).

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 I've seen a few research papers on the subject. Most refer to work done by John Hobby (of Bell Labs) and Gu Guoan in the early '80s using Knuth's Metafont; see their paper.
—Joel