Meiryo

Vorlage:Nihongo is a Japanese sans-serif gothic typeface. Microsoft bundled Meiryo with Office Mac 2008 as part of the standard install, and it replaces MS Gothic as the default system font for Vista on Japanese systems.

It was decided that a new Japanese font was needed, as the current ones (mainly MS Gothic and MS Mincho) are incompatible with Microsoft's ClearType subpixel rendering technologyVorlage:Fact: Meiryo is intended to increase legibility of characters on LCD screens. ClearType has been available in Windows for Latin fonts since the release of Windows XP in October 2001. However, unlike Latin fonts which use the ClearType hinting system for all sizes, the Japanese fonts distributed with Windows included embedded bitmaps versions of the fonts in small sizes. Although fonts using only hinted CJK glyphs exist (such as Arial Unicode), they had not been distributed with Windows prior to Vista.

According to Tom Rickner of Ascender Corporation, who helped program and font-hinted it, Meiryo is one of the first Japanese fonts created on and for the computer screen and took two years to create and engineer.

Meiryo UI

Meiryo UI a version that uses condensed kana, introduced with Windows 7. Similar to MS Gothic, the Meiryo UI fonts are bundled with the same Meiryo TTC files of respective weights.

Characteristics

Meiryo was designed as the enhanced version of Verdana, regarded as a highly readable font. The font's baseline was raised slightly to improve readability when mixing Latin and CJK texts. Meiryo glyphs for kanji and kana also have a height-to-width ratio of 95:100.

In previous Japanese fonts distributed with Windows, embedded bitmap glyphs are used whenever font size is set to around 9 points. Unlike previous fonts designed for CJK environments, Meiryo contains no embedded bitmaps. To improve readability under small font sizes without using embedded bitmaps, TrueType hinting language was used for stroke-reduction. Similar technology was used on MingLiu and PMingLiu versions 5.03.

Meiryo is developed to comply with JIS X 0213:2004 and can also use the newest set of personal name characters provided by the Japanese Minister of Justice. In addition, it contains OpenType tables for JIS78, JIS83, JIS90 forms for legacy usages.

Meiryo supports following OpenType layout features for Cyrillic, Greek, Han Ideographic, Kana, Latin scripts: nalt, afrc, dnom, dlig, frac, fwid, hwid, hkna, ital, jp78, jp83, jp90, numr, qwid, ruby, sinf, zero, smcp, c2sc, liga, sups, twid, vkna, vrt2, vert, kern.

Meiryo also contains glyphs not normally accessible without font editor. These glyphs include circled 00, 51-100; negative circled 00, 21-100, a-z, A-Z, kana; (rounded) square-enclosed characters, negative (rounded) square-enclosed characters; 2x2 CJK words.

The italic version of Meiryo only provides italicized glyphs for the Latin alphabet as written Japanese is traditionally not italicized.

Availability

For Microsoft Windows, Meiryo is distributed as two TrueType Collection files, with regular and bold glyphs stored in separate files. Each file also contains an italic variant of the font.

As stated earlier, the font is included with the Windows Vista operating system.

For Windows XP, the font has become available free of charge by obtaining the Japanese version of Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition and electing to install the Microsoft Silverlight runtime. Downloading and installing the Japanese ClearType fonts for Windows XP from Microsoft also makes Meiryo available on Windows XP.

Meiryo is also distributed with Japanese version of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac.

Authors

The Japanese characters of Meiryo were designed by C&G Inc. and Eiichi Kōno, who also redesigned the Johnston font which is now used by London Underground as New Johnston. The Latin characters were designed by Matthew Carter, the British-born creator of the Verdana font, and are visibly similar to characters from Verdana. By having a font designed by a combination of Japanese and Latin font experts, Microsoft strived to create a font in which written English and Japanese could present themselves well together side-by-side on the screen. American Tom Rickner of Ascender Corporation did extensive programming and font hinting for Meiryo. Rickner helped create the first TrueType fonts at Apple and did all the font hinting for Microsoft’s Georgia and Verdana fonts. According to Rickner, Meiryo is one of the first Japanese fonts created on and for the computer screen and took two years to create and engineer.

About the name

The font name comes from the Japanese word Meiryō (明瞭) Vorlage:IPA-ja, which means "clarity", referring to ClearType making text written in Meiryo appear clearer on the screen. The Japanese spelling メイリオ is taken from the English pronunciation Vorlage:IPA-en; the actual Japanese spelling of 明瞭 in katakana is メイリョウ.

According to Eiichi Kōno, the name was chosen for its exotic-sounding pronunciation and its compactness.

Problems

• At small sizes, dimensions of printed kanji characters are not even. However, small-size kanji rendering has been traditionally problematic involving trade-offs in legibility and other factors like spacing. That was fixed in Meiryo version 6 included with Windows 7.

• At small sizes, stroke reduction is not consistent with the methods used by other fonts such as MS Gothic.

• Sized between 11 and 13 points (96 dpi), glyphs have inconsistent stroke weight without the activation of ClearType. These visual annoyances are not limited to CJK in Meiryo or the Meiryo font itself, but unfortunately are found in a many of the new breed of anti-aliased fonts, such as those found in the C-family that is packaged with Microsoft Vista and recent versions of Microsoft Office, when used in the manner described. In fact, the same kinds of problems are also found in anti-aliased fonts that are more closely associated with UNIX/Linux/BSD. Sometimes, especially on the Mac OS X and Linux platforms, these problems can sometimes be avoided by displaying fonts in semi-bold or bold as their normal (lightest) font weight. Needless to say, this approach comes with its own problems for those who prefer the crisp look of lighter fonts.

• When italicized, only Latin characters are slanted, not CJK characters and kana. CJK characters use other methods of emphasis or quotation indication; thus differing from, for example, the typefaces of Romance languages (unrelated distinctions between cursive and non-cursive and other traditional writing styles do exist). Nowadays, however, italicization is used in advertising but usually combined with other, common forms of emphasis, such as bold weight, exclamation marks, and, in Japanese, katakana use. Academic texts, for example, do not use italicized CJK characters as opposed to those in non-CJK languages, e.g. in traditionally Latin-1 encoded European languages that use italics for things like inline quotations. Since these traditions of italicization simply don't exist in CJK, the decisions made for Meiryo is clearly based on the existing general use. According to Microsoft, Meiryo uses a customized version of Verdana for italics instead of the generic slanting method. Although the font includes an OpenType table for italics, this feature only substitutes characters already included in the font, instead of applying transformation effects to the affected characters. Since Meiryo only has italic characters for Latin, Greek, Coptic, and Cyrillic characters, it is an indication that Windows Vista does not use emulated italic effects if it uses a substitute font for italic effect but cannot find the correct glyph in the italic font. Similarly, most of the OpenType tables used in the font (except kern) only work if substitute glyphs are available inside the font.

• Although it is a proportional font, the font name does not contain a 'P' to indicate this in Windows font lists as with ＭＳ Ｐゴシック and ＭＳ Ｐ明朝.

• Meiryo uses greater line spacing than Verdana which Meiryo has incorporated, as do Segoe families and other East Asian fonts, including the new fonts shipped with Windows Vista.

• Characters for triple and quadruple dash box-drawing characters all have six dashes. Furthermore, all horizontal dash box-drawing characters have three dashes when using OpenType's half-width features.

• Because of its compliance with JIS X 0213:2004, variant glyphs have different stroke layouts from the ones used in older MS Gothic and other conventional fonts. To use older glyphs in a web page, it needs to be activated manually. However, Meiryo is not alone for being criticized of following the standards. MingLiU and PMingLiU version 5.03 follow the standards set by Taiwan's Ministry of Education and the reference rendering used in Unicode documents, which also causes dissatisfaction among users. However, in the case of MingLiU update, version 5 does not have embedded bitmap fonts for small sizes, and the update pack does not include uninstall feature. On the other hand, MS Gothic, MS PGothic, MS UI Gothic, MS Mincho, MS PMincho can be updated to version 5.00, which include JIS X 0213:2004 support to match the glyphs used in Meiryo, and also incorporated JIS90 Forms OpenType Layout Table for users preferring the old glyphs. For Vista users, Microsoft also offered an update to make MS Gothic and MS Mincho font families to use glyphs in JIS X 0208-1990.

Awards

Tokyo Type Directors club awarded 2007 Type design prize to Eiichi Kōno, C&G Inc (Satoru Akamoto, Takeharu Suzuki, Yukiko Ueda), Matthew Carter on Meiryo font.

References

• ClearType page at Microsoft Design
• メイリオ on the Japanese Wikipedia
• Channel9 interview with Cleartype Team
• Design Meets Technology

External links

• Microsoft typography: Meiryo, Meiryo UI
• Sample at Microsoft Japan PressPass (information for journalists)
• It's Not Just Fonts
• Japanese ClearType fonts for Windows XP