Font Hirakakupro W3 FULL Version
Josephine Heathershaw
I am working on a japanese website and have a hard time finding a font which looks good in japanese. I was surprised that so few fonts seem to exist for japanese. My team has contacted several web font providers without much success. Only one company could offer a web font for japanese but it was 35 megabytes which is far to big for the clients to download to their browsers.
Web-font for Japanese, though there are few providers exist, is not really practical as you found the size of the font data is too big to download. Usually Japanese font has 8,000-16,000 glyph so making new fonts means you need to make at least 8,000 glyph, which is pretty heavy task. As a result of it, there are very few variations in Japanese fonts, and Japanese users also care about fonts less than Latin-character users.
Most Japanese websites use default font sets provided on Windows or Mac. The latest ones are Meiryo and Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro. For older versions such like Windows XP, it is good to add former default fonts MS Gothic(or MS Mincho)/Osaka.
Something I learned working here: some Japanese prefer Gothic or other fonts over Mincho fonts, as Mincho looks more "Chinese" according to some. None of the companies above use Mincho as evidence to that. Like it or not, I guess that's something to keep in mind when branding.
This is an old thread but for anyone doing research on this now, you should note that Meiryo is no longer a standard font loaded with Windows. Since Windows 10, the new default font is Yu Gothic. You can still install Meiryo manually however. Please see this article
I am no font/design expert, but just about every Japanese PC should have basic Latin fonts like the ones you mentioned installed, so they will work. But those fonts give a kind of Western look to Japanese characters. If you want to use fonts that Japanese sites typically use I would start by browsing some of the more popular Japanese sites and using things like Firebug or the Chrome developer tools to examine the CSS and see what fonts they reference. For example, yahoo.co.jp currently has this CSS:
The "gothic" typeface fonts seem fairly popular these days: on Windows, fonts like MS Gothic, MS PGothic, etc. Ming typeface is also widely used. These are the default browser font settings for Firefox on my Japanese Windows machine:
BTW, the "Osaka" font was a standard font on Japanese Macs in the 90s. Unless you want that "retro" feel, is highly recommended to use "Hiragino Sans" (not Kaku Gothic that's deprecated) for macOS and iOS devices for a consistent and modern look and better legibility. Also Hiragino Sans has far more font weights (10) than Kaku Gothic (only 2).
'Noto Sans CJK JP' is also available for Ubuntu linux. It is provided as an official package "fonts-noto-cjk". Still manual installation is required, it is expected to have it installed on Japanese Ubuntu machines.
I'm having some trouble importing fonts in the R environment. My end goal is to include my company's custom font(.ttf files) R for use in ggplot and RMarkdown. I've tried breaking down the problem and noticed that the same problem occurs importing regular Windows fonts. The importing doens't throw any errors, but the fonts are not available for use in plots. I'm using R version 3.5.1 running on Windows 10 Pro 1803.
I've tried importing the Windows fonts using the extrafont package as well as using the showtext packakge. I have also tried to manually copy all the Windows ttf files from C:\WINDOWS\Fonts to C:\Users...\Documents\R\R-3.5.1\library\extrafontdb\metrics , same issue persists.
You can modify the Graphic Device for RStudio to AGG and work with the fonts in a seamless way. Just like the default ones (Changing just the "family" on theme()). Just install the ragg package and follow:
The command loadfonts(device = "win") is necesary to properly prepare the fonts for use. Add this after loading the fonts. Seems like font_import is the install_packages() cue, and loadfonts() is the library cue. This should work:
Hira Kaku Pro-W3 is a free Japanese font / typeface which can be used for commercial purposes without having to obtain permission from the original author. Download Hira Kaku Pro-W3 Japanese font for free.
Hi,
I'm new to ArchLinux and I'm trying to configure a LaTeX environment to make documents in Japanese but I'm having some troubles to get my documents in postscript.
I didn't have any problems with the compiler pLaTeX so I did manage to compile my tex files in dvi, but I am having problems with reading my dvi files with xdvi and transforming my files from dvi to ps with dvips. In both cases it seems that the fonts are not properly configured and I get this error :
I did look up for that and tried some solutions which seemed to have worked for other persons, such as adding a kanji.map file to map rml and adding this file with updmap --edit or updmap-sys --edit, but no way to get this to work properly.
I have the following fonts installed :
Basically, TeX is failing to find the font which you've asked for (rml). When it fails to find it ready-made, it assumes it might be in metafont format and looks for rules for creating a usable form. Those don't exist so, as a last resort, it falls back to a default font (Computer Modern Roman). But cmr won't work for Japanese because the characters just aren't there.
When I say you are looking at the wrong thing, you are looking at what fonts your *system* has installed. But TeX can't use system fonts - certainly not if you need the tex -> dvi -> ps route. It also cannot use truetype fonts this way. (Unless pLaTeX somehow enables all this.) So the question is, what fonts do you have installed for TeX to use?
Given what is working, it seems as if you might have the tex font metric files for the font installed correctly but that either the type 1 (or other) fonts aren't set up correctly or they aren't installed at all. The reason the dvipdfmx mode works is, I think, because you are not embedding fonts in the pdf. That means it is up to the system/viewer to supply the actual shapes of the characters. And apparently your set up is able to do this. (Either rml is installed and it recognises this or it is substituting an acceptable default.) However, the pdf file you produce in this way is not safe to send to another machine unless you know that machine also has suitable fonts available. So don't, for example, email somebody a job application with this set up because the pdf will not necessarily display correctly on their machine!
OK. So, I don't know anything about typesetting Japanese but:
- do you need the tex -> dvi -> ps route? Or would tex -> pdf with pdfLaTeX or something like XeLaTeX be a possibility? If XeLaTeX, say, is an option, you can avoid the entire mess which is TeX font set up and use system fonts directly, including truetype, opentype... whatever. If pdfLaTeX is an option, you need to deal with TeX font set up but you have a bit more flexibility e.g. support for truetype.
- what is rml?
- can you provide a minimal .tex file demonstrating the problem?
- how did you install your TeX system? If you used Arch packages, which packages do you have installed, especially font packages?
Hi and thank you very much for your answer.
Actually I've always been using TeX as a complete end user so I never really think of what was really going on when compiling and so on.
By reading your answer I did understand what was really the problem but though I tried a little harder to fix that I still wasn't able to get it to work.
However I think that this time dvipdfmx should be working properly (with embarked fonts).
For Japanese, I have the following fonts :
To answer your questions, I would not mind using something else than dvi -> ps -> pdf, but is it possible to get the TikZ package (which seems to rely on pstricks) to work with pdfLaTeX or XeLaTeX ?
As far as I could look up for, rml is the name of a TFM file for Japanese fonts and by extension the name of this font.
For a minimal file, anything with Japanese will do, right now I'm just trying to compile :
I installed TeX with pacman, by installing the group texlive-most (which contains texlive-fontsextra), and the packages texlive-langcjk and texlive-langextra. Finally, I installed the fonts showned above in /usr/share/fonts/japanese-otf manually.
The changes I tried to make were all global changes, but as it just didn't seem to work I restored the original configuration, so the only difference there should be between my installation and the basic one should be what I appended in dvipdfmx.cfg, and the fonts that I manually installed.
As far as I could look up for, rml is the name of a TFM file for Japanese fonts and by extension the name of this font.
For a minimal file, anything with Japanese will do, right now I'm just trying to compile :
If I compile this with platex, I get an empty dvi. If I convert to ps with dvips, I get something which is obviously not Japanese and if I convert that to pdf, I get something which is obviously not Japanese. I'm not getting the errors you're seeing but I'm also not getting a dvi which looks anything like OK. But this is presumably because I don't have Japanese fonts installed for my system generally.
I would try avoiding the system fonts for now and using ones which come with texlive, if possible. I have a map file at texmf-dist/fonts/map/dvipdfmx/ptex/morisawa.map which gives a different mapping for rml. There are tfm and vf files corresponding to this map on my installation. Note that I did not install texlive through pacman and I don't know how the packagers have split the packages or exactly where they are located on your system.
Do you know if the standard tools for working with .vf and .tfm files should work for Japanese fonts? I ask because I get errors if I try to convert these files to readable format and file doesn't recognise the tfm files, at least, as tfm files. These commands work fine on e.g. a random tfm I picked under adobe/palantino. I was trying to figure out which fonts these were pointing to. Unfortunately, I know nothing about Japanese fonts but I'd have expected the tools to work if they are regular tfm files.
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