Japan Font Download
Jasmine Lemaitre
Question:I'm currently taking a Japanese History course, and typing up (what I believe to be) a very pretty set of course notes. However, I'm having trouble finding an appropriate font. I'm currently using one of my Chinese fonts which has a medium calligraphic style to it, however it doesn't have great Japanese support. I am strongly preferential to free fonts, for the obvious reason of being a poor university student.
I've searched for Japanese fonts across the internet but I'm having significant trouble finding a Japanese font that matches my body text (EB Garamond). If anyone can point me in the right direction that'd be amazing.(Please pay no attention to the grammatical/spelling errors, this is from the latest class period and hasn't been edited yet)
OP's comments: This was originally on the Japanese SE website, but they quickly closed and deleted it without consideration of the fact that their community was probably the single best resources for this topic.
My computer seems to have Kozuka Mincho Pro, which has a huge base of glyphs. Even some white-on black kanji and a large selection in both hiragana and katakana. The font came, as far as I know, with my copy of Adobe CS3.
I have seen a number of books successfully pairing Garamond with such a Japanese font. This style of font is called kyōkasho tai (kyōkasho = "textbook", tai = "typeface") and is used, as the name would suggest, in Japanese textbooks. Its shapes are not stylized as in the minchō fonts (right):
and resemble the character that is actually written by hand. (Very much like the single-storey "ɑ" is handwritten and the double-storey "a" is used in most stylized fonts; similarly for "ɡ" and "g".)
Of course good Japanese fonts are almost never free. You can see if the sample of the Kyotai font by Motoya contains all the glyphs you need. (You may have to sign up to their newsletter to download the sample.)
If I understand you correctly, you want to use a Japanese font inside Beaver builder and use this as the default font on your site. Is this correct, you may want to check out this topic which should assist you.
Is there a way to change the default font of asian characters in the editor (namely Japanese, but I expect similar for Chinese or Korean)? I am thinking of a comparable feature Word where you can set default Latin and Asian fonts/formatting. If this is not possible, has it been considered for future updates?
As I type, the English text defaults to my preferred font, and when I switch to Japanese input, I would like the editor font to default to my preferred font, which is not Hiragino Mincho ProN (the Scrivener default), but Epson Kyōkasho (which I have installed as a system font on OS X, and which I can select manually in Scrivener, but not by default).
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.
Here's an answer in 2021 after my research and from my experience living and working in Japan. I like this article, though it is in Japanese so I'll do my best to summarize. Here are what some major companies are using in Japan:
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).
For whom may come in the future, there is a great (long and deep) article on this very matter written by a japanese copywriter: The Most Comprehensive Guide to Web Typography in Japanese or in the archive.org, because there is apparently an issue on mhdigital.
'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 have been working on a website that has pages in English and Japanese. My client has supplied me with the written content in both languages. She wants me to use a particular Japanese font. I have downloaded the font and attempted to install it through the Webflow dashboard. The problem is that the Japanese font file is 15MB and Webflow allows no more than a 2MB font file upload.
It seems like she wants it in a Japanese font other than the one she wrote it in. But if this is so, do you think the solution is to have her write it in the font that she wants to be online. Because we are now able to view a Japanese font (the one she wrote it in I presume).
What my little decoding in Inspector on your site it definately looks like Open Sans is currently being used. In which case you may not have so much of a problem afterall. The Typekit route also would be very beneficial considering they host the font files for you
What is the font used on the JR station signs (like the ones these are modeled on)? As near as I can tell, it's a highly geometric sans-serif, just a little humanist (that is, with just the tiniest variation in stroke width), with a definite similarity to Helvetica. I've tried several on-line font identification engines, and none seem to hit it. I have nothing in my library that comes close to matching it. I'm guessing it's a font JNR made up, and I'm having a difficult time digging anything up on it.
The other link you sent is interesting, I'll have to take a look. I know for a fact that all the station interior signage is done in Helvetica. But the lettering on these particular signs is different, I think...
I know this is a super old post, but just in case anyone comes across this in future asking this exact question: the closest available font you'll find, is called "Neology". Specifically "Neology Deco Medium", but "Neology Medium" is identical unless you specialise in fonts. It's not included in generic programs (like Microsoft Word), but you can search for it, and buy it, from font websites for roughly $US20.
If you want to stick with easily accessed fonts - the closest you'll find is Roboto Medium, which is in most copies of Word / PowerPoint etc!
When you download the tarball for the current snapshot ( -fonts/mplus_outline_fonts/?view=tar) or check out these files via CVS the unpacked directory contains the Illustrator and EPS files, makefile template and scripts necessary to build the TTFs with fontforge.
Is there any update to this, or a walkthrough of how to add a Japanese font? I have not been able to get even a hiragana/katakana set to work with a TextRender component yet, and this is from over a year ago.
Free Japanese Font is all about Japanese fonts that are free to download! This site aims to help you download high quality Japanese fonts that supports hiragana, katakana, kanji characters which normally hard to find.
After copy-and-pasting the table into LibreOffice I noticed that Inconsolata worked, whereas DejaVu Sans Mono does not - which depends, I suppose, on my xorg font substitution settings. (My LibreOffice font substitution settings are empty.) To wit:
There is also one minor issue which I guess must be blamed on org-table, that is when I use the TAB key to navigate through cells, the formatting sometimes changes for the worse. The following is the result of pressing TAB in the leftmost cell:
I'm working on an Android app that will help people learn Japanese kanji using a flash-card style study system. As part of this app, I need to show kanji on the screen both in plain-text form, and also possibly animations of the stroke order.
The problem is that the default system font used in Android, Roboto, doesn't look much like handwritten Japanese. It is very square, and lacks the "hooks" and variations in thickness that I usually see in handwritten kanji. Not only that, but there are some kanji in the font that are drawn in what I am told is a Chinese variant of the writing, that might not reflect the way the kanji is drawn in Japan.
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